by Paul Kane
That was how the story went.
There was, as always, another, quieter story whispered in the narrow alleys and smoky cook rooms of the village. It poured from mouth to ear, accompanied by nods of knowledge and raised eyebrows. The gestures spoke of Arkady’s mother, the dark Ekaterina, discovered over her baby’s cradle, her rosebud lips full of blood and meat and her eyes equally red with the madness of too many sleepless nights brought on by her infant son’s incessant rages against the world. The Boyar’s men took her to the castle and, after he and his entourage had had their fill of her, with one last glance back at daylight she was buried alive in the flower garden, as was the fate of those unfortunates who broke the law in the region of Kashkent.
That was how the other story went.
By the time he was five, Arkady had heard the second version of events several times through the cracked walls of shops and houses; the words carried easily on the fresh, hot summer winds. They didn’t affect him. He found he didn’t care much at all which story was true; the outcome remained the same. He would never scream again, nor gurgle with laughter, nor utter a single word. Arkady had learned his lesson young.
When he was seven, Arkady’s father died. This came as no surprise to anyone, not even the young boy. Whereas Mikhail Melanov had once been a strong and handsome man, he had aged and weakened since his son lost his tongue and those two stories were born. He was often plagued by coughs and chills, until eventually his broad chest crumpled into itself, a hollow space where only a broken heart lived. Arkady would watch his father’s arms tremble as he lifted the heavy trays of hot bread, often nearly dropping them before the next bout of racking coughs would hit him, the boy doing what he could to help and fetching his father water from the jug in their small home at the back of the bakery. Mikhail Melanov would take it and nod in awkward thanks to his silent son, and the young boy would pretend not to see the distaste in his father’s eyes.
When the long winter of that year came, the temperatures fell far below zero as they did each cycle, but this time the breath of the cold blew hard, and in the face of the ice and the winds, Mikhail Melanov’s lungs decided enough was enough and breathed their last. It was not without a sense of relief. Arkady dutifully held his father’s hand as he passed, and then stared long and hard at the cooling body and wondered where the man inside had gone. With no outlet, the question stayed trapped inside the isolated boy.
It was natural that the widow Samolienko and her son Sasha, who had stepped in to help when it was clear that Melanov was reaching the end, should take over the running of the bakery, and most of the village were pleased with the transition. The bread no longer had a coating of germs, and the babushka and her son worked hard to make sure enough loaves were baked each day for no one to go hungry. Young Arkady had a knack for kneading the dough and she kept him on, providing a small bed for him in the room where the wolf or his mother had stolen his tongue. Being neither sentimental nor unkind, she treated the boy with relative indifference. Having only ever lived with his father, who had never hidden well his unease with his son, this seemed perfectly normal to the young boy.
A few days after the widow Samolienko took up residence, she called Arkady away from his work. Arkady saw his father’s few clothes and possessions had been piled up in the middle of the dusty floor. The babushka’s weathered eyes appraised him.
“I need to make space for my own and my son’s clothes.”
Arkady nodded. He wasn’t quite sure what the widow wanted with him. Her hands stretched out and nestled in their floury palms sat an oblong box.
“I found this hidden at the bottom of the cupboard. I think it belonged to your mother.” She shrugged. “It has her name scratched on the lid anyway.”
His eyes fell to the box.
“I think it is some kind of game. Perhaps a puzzle of sorts.” She shook it, and Arkady heard the pieces rattle inside. “Anyway, it seems poorly made and can have no value, so it is yours if you want it.”
Somewhere behind the hardness in her charcoal eyes, Arkady saw a hint of pity for the orphaned boy with no tongue. He took the box and gave her a rare smile. She nodded, satisfied, and sent him back to his work.
Arkady waited until the widow and her son were sleeping before he lit the tiny candle by his bed and pulled the rectangular box out from under his pillow. His breath formed a crystal haze in the night, even the heat from the cooling ovens not enough to keep the arctic winter at bay. He ran his fingers over the rough surface, feeling the strange shape of his long-ago disappeared mother’s name under them. He swallowed hard, his heart beating with an unfamiliar anticipation.
There were ten oblong pieces in all—carved and worked into uneven two-inch tiles—and he carefully took each one out of the box and placed it on the bed next to the one before it, creating a line, before picking the first up again and examining it more thoroughly. He swallowed, his throat dry. Its pale surface was smooth and cool and he knew with a certainty he couldn’t place that it and the others were formed from the bones of dead things. Each piece had a distinct pattern carved into it in fine lines, the grooves stained with black ink. Arkady frowned, his eyes flitting from tile to tile as his numb hands rearranged them, finding each one that linked with the next. When he was done he sat back, vaguely disappointed. He’d expected more from seeing the finished arrangement. Being quietly shunned by the other children of the village whose mothers’ superstitious natures saw too many bad omens in the one thus far defining moment in his short life, Arkady had little experience of puzzles or games, but he thought they should take longer to complete.
He looked at the linked network of delicate lines laid out before him. It felt unfinished. There was more to it; there had to be. His eyes recorded the curves and straights of the design. Even dull and dead as the tiles were, he felt some satisfaction in watching them. Had his mother felt this way? Outside, in the heart of the forest, a wolf howled. The desolate sound danced sadly with the icy blasts that wrapped around the village, seeking any form of company. Having known no different, Arkady couldn’t share the creature’s sense of isolation, but its interruption did break his moment of reverie.
The box and its contents were carefully replaced under his thin pillow, and where the shape should have disturbed his sleep, he found it brought him a quiet comfort.
Arkady heard his first confession two months later. The widow Samolienko had shooed him out of the house in order to greet the family of Elana Vidic. The last thing she needed while encouraging a good match for her son was the strange little orphan boy. Arkady didn’t mind. He was as happy as he knew how to be when in his own company.
Winter still had the landscape in its grip; white knuckles peering through the gray skin of the fields. But the wind had moved on to pastures new, and wrapped in Sasha’s overcoat and scarf, Arkady wandered down to the riverbank, where he thought he might skim some stones over its frozen surface to pass half an hour or so.
He picked a spot that was usually quiet, even in the hot summer months. It was too close to the dense forest and slightly too far from the village to be deemed safe for children to play at. Arkady felt at home there on the edge of things and whenever he had some time of his own, which wasn’t often, as the widow was a firm believer that the Devil made work for idle hands, it was where he found his feet taking him.
On this occasion, he had been beaten to it. Ivan Minsk sat on the snow-covered bank, his knees tucked under his handsome chin as he stared at the frosted mirror of the muddy water. If it hadn’t been for the stream of breath lingering in front of his mouth, Arkady might have thought the older boy was dead, he was so still. It was only when Ivan turned his head to see who had joined him that Arkady noticed Ivan’s hands. They were covered in blood, a stain of guilt on the blanket of white that surrounded them both. He raised his wide eyes to find Ivan’s cold blue gaze on him. The boy’s perfect face twisted into a smile.
“You’re Arkady Melanov? The boy without the tongue?”
> Arkady nodded. He didn’t look at Ivan’s hands.
“You can’t talk?”
Arkady shrugged.
“Can you write?”
Arkady shook his head. His father had had a basic grasp of a few words and, as much as writing would have been a useful tool for Arkady, there was no one except the church who had sufficient knowledge to teach him. And as the widow Samolienko would say, if there was no one able to read his words, then what would be the point of him writing any?
Ivan’s smile stretched. “Do you know what I’ve done?”
He looked down at his own hands, turning them this way and that, watching the pale sunlight sparkle on their crimson coating. He didn’t wait for an answer. “I’ve killed a pig. One of Korkova’s. Fat bastard probably hasn’t even noticed it’s missing yet. I took it into the forest and carved it up while it was still alive.”
He looked at Arkady, expecting a reaction. Arkady felt nothing. He knew that to steal a pig was a terrible crime, and in winter, when all food was valued, then it would be even more so, but there were things in Ivan’s eyes that he couldn’t understand.
“I could feel its fear and pain. It was beautiful.” Ivan seemed lost in the moment and Arkady shuffled from foot to foot, wishing that the other boy would just go and he could bounce the small collection of stones in his pocket across the river.
“And there was so much blood.” The boy raised his hands to smell them. “I think maybe, next time, I might try it with a person. I think that would be better, don’t you?”
He looked at Arkady and smiled. Arkady, of course, said nothing. After a few silent moments, he left Ivan to his reverie and found a different place to throw his stones, but his mind couldn’t quite leave the perfectly handsome boy with blood on his hands who was sitting not so very far along the curve of the river.
Ivan Minsk was found dead the next morning. It seemed he’d been skating on the river down by the forest and the thick ice’s surface had given way in a freak accident. The women of the village wailed and sobbed and the men’s faces were grim at the loss of such a strong and handsome boy. The widow brewed hot tea in the large samovar she kept for special occasions, and with a plate of freshly baked sweet cakes between them, the babushkas gathered in the home behind the bakery to shake their heads and gossip under the guise of bemoaning the cruelty of the world.
Arkady took refuge in his room and wondered if he was the only one to notice the lack of ice skates on the blue and frozen body that was pulled through the grieving village. Probably. His fingers sought out the comfort of the tiles inside the box, and when the level of noise was such from the other room that he was sure he wouldn’t be disturbed, he tipped them out onto the bed and proceeded to make the now familiar pattern.
As he turned over the first tile, his eyes widened. It had changed. Where the delicate carving had been inked in black, the pattern now was filled with red. Arkady stared, before carefully placing it next to the others, their surfaces still dull and dead. His heart raced with rare excitement. He had been right; the puzzle hadn’t been complete. He thought of Ivan and his stained hands and looked back at the crimson color that ran like blood through the veins of the tile. There were nine more tiles to go. And then . . . what?
That night, he found it hard to sleep.
Arkady never sought out the confessions. Having no method of communication beyond gesture, he grew into a natural pragmatist. As often as he wishfully turned the tiles over in his hands, he also knew that fate would roll her dice as and when she was ready. That part of the puzzle was not in his control. For the main, in the years that followed, Arkady got on with the business of growing up and working hard for the widow, for Sasha, and for Sasha’s new wife, Elena.
But the confessions found him all the same; eight more over the next six years. In a side street while trying to make a shortcut on his deliveries for the widow, a sobbing fat man told him that his wife had not died of a fever the winter before as was believed, but that when it seemed that she might recover, he pressed a pillow over her face, not being able to bear the thought of more years chained to her natural misery. He’d seen her ghost though, every day since. Arkady nodded and passed the man by.
A drunk told him how he liked to creep into his small daughter’s bedroom when she slept and slide his hand under her nightdress. One of the most respected wives of the village told him how she craved the rough skin of workmen on her body and paid them to service her and thus make up for her husband’s impotence.
Each stranger that found him in those isolated moments poured out the dark sins of their soul. They were eager to be free of their guilt without having to truly face justice; that much was clear in their hungry faces. Arkady could see the burdens lift from their shoulders as his ears took their words. When he left, they were always smiling, just as Ivan had been down by the river. Arkady didn’t begrudge them their happiness. By the third time, he knew what the next day’s outcome would be. A heart attack, an unfortunate fall, a sudden pox.
He would listen for the slow toll of the church bell before pulling the box of tiles out from their safekeeping in his bed. With each death, a fresh piece would come to life, its veins of pattern turning bloodred. Arkady felt nothing for their deaths, but there was a quiet excitement that his soul couldn’t deny each time his trembling hands revealed the changes in the puzzle. When it was complete, then so would he be. By the time he was fourteen, there was only one dark tile left. As the first crisp leaves of snow fell outside his window that winter, for the first time in his life he felt a glimmer of warm hope. The completed pattern would free him from this half existence. He was sure of it.
When the summer came, it was obvious it was time for a change in the living arrangements at the bakery. Sasha and Elena’s lively five-year-old twins were getting too big to sleep in the same room as their parents, and the baker’s wife’s belly was already growing a new sibling for the family. The house at the back of the shop was too crowded and the widow took it upon herself to rectify the situation.
“I have arranged a new position for you, Arkady.” She smiled as she spoke. She had grown fond of the boy in her own way over the years; he was a good worker and had never caused her any trouble. This change would be good for him. It would bring him some security. The boy looked up at her blankly.
“You are to work for the Boyar. You will go and live within the castle walls as a manservant.” She paused. “I think a young man like you will do well there.”
Arkady knew what she meant. The Boyar could be considered a fair ruler as far as taxes and tithes were concerned, but stories that leaked from the high walls that surrounded his castle and the dwellings and merchants within told of excessive debauchery and pleasures taken in the most deadly of sins by their landlord and his knights and clergy. Those who were caught spreading the stories were often hung on crosses outside the castle walls, their beaten bodies soft for the buzzards that would circle and peck hungrily, tearing strips of flesh from the still living victims.
To speak ill of the Boyar was a crime, and although there were great rewards to be had in the trust of the Boyar’s employment, the risks concerning accusations of malicious gossip were high. It was, after all, an easy way to remove a rival. With no tongue, it was a crime that Arkady could never commit. The old babushka, who had lived long enough to understand the ways of men, knew that with both his pliable nature and his silence, Arkady could not fail to impress the Boyar, and perhaps one day he would see fit to reward the old woman and her family for this gift. It was not that much to hope for.
The Boyar’s men came the next day and Arkady left, the puzzle tucked carefully into his jacket pocket. He didn’t look back at the village, the horse beneath him carrying him confidently the few miles uphill to the high castle walls. It was only when the gates closed heavily behind him that he thought of the whispered stories of his mother’s demise within these very grounds and at his new employer’s hands. Arkady found himself still empty of any feelings. Hi
s mother was not even the memory of a scent, and as he had several times before, he found himself wondering whether the wolf that took his tongue had somehow taken his heart, or perhaps some small part of his soul, with it.
The more he watched those in the world around him play out their small stories, the less he felt a part of it. On those nine occasions when people had shared with him the darkest secrets of their sins, he simply found himself puzzled by the range of emotion presented to him; their passion, their lust, their greed, and the heavy weight of their guilt. He’d felt nothing but mild curiosity. It was only when he placed bone against tiled bone and watched the puzzle coming together that he felt anything at all.
Arkady settled into life within the castle, and the summer months passed easily. The Boyar had grown fat and gout-ridden as he crept into his middle age, but if anything, as his body degenerated, its desires increased as if, by feeding them, he could somehow delay his inevitable demise. There were plenty among his retinue who were more than happy to encourage his pleasures in order to satisfy their own. Screams echoed up from the dungeons where new tortures were devised to be carried out on local thieves and petty criminals.
Lithe young women, and sometimes older ones, roamed naked between the castle’s bedrooms, herded in from the surrounding towns and villages and drugged with alcohol and herbal liquors brewed by the Boyar’s apothecaries. If they were lucky, their moans of pleasure did not turn to howls of pain. For the others, once they had fallen still and silent with relief, their deaths ensuring their ordeals were truly over, Arkady was always there with his bucket and hard wooden scrubbing brush to clear the floors of warm blood and then fill the baths with sweet-smelling water for the knights and their leader to bathe in.
