Speaking to Skull Kings

by Emily B. Cataneo

  “I’ll return in a few hours.” Elena slipped the diadem into her other pocket, in case she had to barter for anything.

  Nina snatched up her book and didn’t say goodbye.

  * * *

  The lit domes of St. Sophia cast ghostly light over the marshes as Elena marched on the western road towards the city. She climbed the snowy bluff along the river, then hurried towards the gate and the hollow light on the guard station.

  The soldier leaning against the gate could only be Ivan. He stank bitter of vodka, and his nose and cheeks were pocked with broken blood vessels.

  Elena whipped a page, torn from a book, out of her coat pocket.

  “Here are my papers,” she said through the scarf wrapped around her face. She thrust them at Ivan and shouldered towards him, but he held out a black-gloved hand.

  “Lemme lookit this,” he slurred. He held up the yellowed pages, squinting. “This...this isn’t...”

  “Yes, it is.” Elena pointed to the paper. “Don’t you see it? You should let me through, now.”

  Ivan’s lips curled, and he shook his head. His watery blue eyes were sober enough to understand that the paper was only a book-page, that she was one of the Ankudinov sisters, that she had accoutrement.

  Elena drew her grandmother’s diadem out of her pocket, clenched it so she could feel its diamonds through her gloves.

  “You’ll accept this, instead of papers.”

  “No,” Ivan said. “I don’t want...” He raised his hand, opened his mouth to call his fellow guards.

  Elena dropped the diadem and plunged her hand into her other coat pocket and pulled out the revolver-cuff, curled her finger around the angry black comma of a trigger.

  His children will be orphans. Just like me and Nina. The thought leapt into her mind, she couldn’t help it, but she looked at the hammer and plough on his cap.

  I am the firebird. No one catches the firebird.

  The snap of the safety, and then she pointed the revolver-cuff at him and pulled the trigger.

  She expected the bullet to rip through his uniform-breast. She didn’t expect the bullet to make a small neat black hole through his neck. She expected blood trickling from a wound, not dark liquid spurting from the bullet-hole, like something from a terrible theater production. Ivan clawed at his neck and crashed to his knees, then spilled onto the ground. His boots kicked against the frozen dirt beneath the harsh spotlight.

  She couldn’t look. She slapped her hands over her eyes, then twisted away and clamped her hands over her ears so she couldn’t hear the swish swish of his stilling legs scraping against the ground, so she couldn’t hear the dying cries of this man, this enemy, this enemy who had children, children who would never see their father cross their threshold again...

  Oil. I need to get oil. He’ll have oil for his gun. She crouched, her boots grinding into blood, and slid her hand along Ivan’s belt until she found a can.

  The can slipped from her hand when her gullet turned and she threw up. She grabbed the can and ran without wiping her mouth, crashing up to her knees in the crusty snow, racing back to the boxcar, the hole blossoming in Ivan’s neck over and over like a motion picture show she couldn’t stop watching.

  * * *

  Elena expected Nina to cry. But she maintained a stony silence as the oil dripped into her lungs, as she sipped her tea, as she curled in her furs, arms crossed and jaw tight.

  “You used that oil on my lungs,” she finally said. “You killed a man for it, a man who wasn’t so dreadful at all.”

  “He joined the Red Army.” Elena pressed her boots against the woodstove, trying to stop her legs from shaking. She was oiling the revolver-cuff, focusing on the metal and wood, trying, trying, trying to forget the hole in Ivan’s neck...

  “Perhaps he didn’t have any other choice. I’m sure there are plenty of them that didn’t have a choice. You’re a murder—”

  “That man betrayed us, just like all the other men in Novgorod. They put on red uniforms and rose against us. Don’t you side with him.” It was true, Ivan deserved it, he deserved to die like that, he was a bad man. He was.

  “I—”

  Elena slammed her feet onto the floor. “Mother and Father are dead. And you’re siding with their killers.”

  Nina glared and puffed out her chest. “You pretend to be so very tough, Lena, but look at you, your hands are shaking.”

  “Could you be any more naïve? I’m glad Mother and Father are dead, so they don’t have to see how you’ve betrayed us by saying these—”

  Nina swung her hand back, then swooped it at Elena, and Elena’s cheek stung. She lurched away as Nina raised her hand to slap her again.

  “You listen to me,” Nina snarled, her voice ragged. “You’ve gone too far, and Mother and Father would be ashamed of you, not of me. You orphaned children, and you’ve gotten blood on your hands. What you did was terrible and wrong, and you know it.”

  Elena knelt, ground the heels of her hands against her eyes. All she wanted was to be a girl again, in their house, pretending to be the firebird with Nina, knowing Mother and Father were reading in the parlor.

  The hole appeared in Ivan’s neck, over and over again in her mind, the man whose children she had orphaned...

  “It was terrible, Nina.” The words spilled out before she could stop them. “Oh God, it was... the worst part was, I want-ed to see him die, I did, but then I—then...”

  Nina’s hand rubbed against her back. “But, Lena, don’t you see, this is why we must leave Russia, we have to escape, because if we stayed, you’ll fall, over the line, into an...why—”

  Nina tightened her chin. “Into an unredeemable place.”

  Elena felt brass feathers scrape her thighs, wondered if she would have to let them lop her tail off. “When I think of it... But we can’t leave, Nina. We don’t have any way to escape.

  We’re being hunted.”

  Nina twisted her lips back and forth, frowning. “I’m quite sure we’ll sort something out. I’m sure we will. Perhaps you should sleep, and we’ll sort something out in the morning.”

  Elena let Nina help her to her bunk, but even after she burrowed under her shawls, she couldn’t sleep. She watched the flickering light from the woodstove make bear-monsters from the furs of the boxcar walls. She turned first one way, then the other, as the candle burned low and...

  Diadems dropped into the snow, and she tripped over them. Holes appeared beneath her boots, tiny holes that all joined together until there was no place on the ground for her to step. As Elena stumbled, the woman in the threadbare brown dress raced past her, leaping over the gaping holes opening in the ground. Everywhere she turned Ivan kept falling, and falling, and falling...

  When she opened her sticky eyes to pale dawn filtering through the boxcar’s transom windows, she was determined.

  She couldn’t be the monster-firebird anymore. She and Nina would run, away from their estate and Novgorod, and once they’d reached one of the bigger cities, Moscow or Petrograd, they would blend into the crowd, find the papers and passports they needed to escape Russia.

  Elena sat up to tell Nina her new plan.

  But Nina’s bedclothes were thrown back. Her bunk was empty.

  * * *

  Elena pulled on her hat, shrugged into her coat, stormed out of the boxcar. She hurried towards the raised road through the marshes.

  She scrutinized every lump of snow-laden grass, the dark maw of every puddle, her heart racing beneath her woolen coat, wondering where Nina could have possibly gone. She hoped Nina hadn’t ventured out to try to find papers and a passport herself. She hoped her sister hadn’t done anything foolish. She hoped she would return and the two of them could strike out across the snowy plains, run far away from the blackened gold tower of the house behind the hill, far away from bullet holes in necks and the demented dark firebird inside Elena.

  She crossed the thick ice of the frozen river that ringed the city on the west side, and slip
ped and slid halfway up the bluff on the river’s far bank. She peered over the bluff at the kremlin’s squat black guard towers and the plains around the city. Long black coats flapped around the base of the towers: guards, bayonets glinting.

  Elena waited behind the bluff as the sun rose and descended in a small arc on the horizon.

  As the gloaming fell on the kremlin, two figures detached from the cadre of guards by the tower and hurried along the southern road. Elena trudged down the river, tripping over lumps in the thick ice. She reached the southern road and hid in the rustling frozen reeds of the marshes, waiting for the two figures.

  As they drew near, their faces resolved from shadow. One of them was the soldier who had saved them from the guards on the gate.

  The other was Nina.

  Elena forced dry cold air into her lungs and began to put the puzzle pieces together: Nina’s disappearance the night before. Her endless requests to go to the city. The fact that she had known his name.

  Elena leapt out of the marsh. Nina shrank back, and the soldier drew his gun.

  “No, stop, that’s my sister,” Nina said, as Elena whipped the gun-cuff out of her pocket.

  “I know.” Aleksandr pointed the gun at her, and she raised the gun-cuff.

  Nina’s head swiveled between Aleksandr and Elena.

  “Lena, listen to me. Aleksandr has obtained false passports, papers, train tickets to Berlin, for us.”

  Nina, in the arms of a Red Army soldier. Elena felt her feathers spreading. “How long have you been sneaking around with him?”

  “No, no, no, don’t become stubborn and contrary. I love him.” Nina cocked her head towards Aleksandr as though his reaction was all that mattered anymore, as though she spoke and breathed only for him.

  Elena didn’t doubt that Nina believed she loved this soldier. But she swiveled towards Aleksandr, who lowered his gun slightly but tightened his jaw beneath his plough and hammer cap.

  “How do I know these passports and papers are valid?” she said. If Aleksandr wanted a pretext to lure both Nina and Elena into the hands of border guards, this was the perfect opportunity.

  “He loves me, Lena.”

  Elena flared her frozen nostrils and thought of their chances. Nina may love him, but life’s not a novel where a soldier falls in love with you and puts you on a train to a new life. He might be plotting to betray us. “Why did you join the Red Army? Were you conscripted?”

  “I volunteered,” Aleksandr raised his chin. “I never knew my father. He was shot by Cossacks on Bloody Sunday when I was a boy, and they sent me to an orphanage. I wanted to destroy the people that did that to me.”

  So he hated nobles for the same reason that she hated peasants. “In that case, how am I supposed to trust—”

  “Nina is an innocent, and you are her sister.” Aleksandr squeezed Nina’s hand. “They’re hunting you. You must leave as soon as possible. Tonight.”

  Elena looked away from Nina’s reproachful pout. She thought of a nation of created monsters, destroying each other, and reminded herself of her resolution to flee.

  “Very well,” she said, not taking her eyes off Aleksandr.

  “We’ll go with you.”

  Her boots crunched through the snow as she followed Nina and Aleksandr towards the boxcar. The burned tower rose before them on the other side of the hill, silhouetted against the moon’s glow.

  “I don’t like you sneaking around behind my back,” Elena said. “Has this been happening since autumn? How did you even meet him?”

  “In the market, when you were sick, I—”

  “Shh.” Aleksandr held up a hand, frowning. “What’s that sound?”

  The whine of an engine, the roar of a muffler, and yellow headlights arced over the marshes.

  Aleksandr leapt around Nina and stepped in front of Elena.

  An automobile roared around the bend in the road, tires skidding on the snow. Before it even stopped, doors swung open and three figures with guns swarmed around them, hands yanking up Nina’s coat-sleeves to expose her wrists, snatching at Elena’s coat, twisting her arm so the revolver-cuff flew into the snow.

  “The noble sisters,” wheezed the man who had seized Elena. It was Gleb, the guard from the gate, wearing the uniform of one of the special forces troops from Petrograd. Elena snarled, twisting, and her scalp screamed as Gleb seized her bun and twisted her hair.

  “What is the meaning of this?” Aleksandr said, low and cold.“What is the meaning of this? What is the meaning of you taking one of these sisters out of the city without turning her over to the border guards?”

  Aleksandr jerked Nina away from the two soldiers who held her, wrapped his hand around her forearm as though he might protect her forever with that simple gesture.

  Something fell inside Elena. She had been wrong. The love this man felt for her sister had nothing to do with passports or aristocracy or power.

  Am I so broken that I can’t even believe in love anymore?

  “I’ll handle this,” Aleksandr was shouting.

  “You think so, do you?” Gleb said.

  “I’m ordering—”

  “You don’t give orders anymore. I report to Petrograd now.

  So who orders who?”

  Silence. Elena raked her feathers through the air, hoping to slice Gleb’s leg with them.

  Then Gleb flung her aside. The snow rushed towards her and she rolled onto her back.

  Gleb faced Aleksandr, drawing his revolver, as Elena snatched the revolver-cuff out of the snow.

  “You’ve been with this noble girl and your head’s gone >up your ass,” Gleb said. The two men who had grabbed Nina straightened their revolvers.

  “I just said, I will handle—” Aleksandr said.

  “You’re a traitor to the Revolution.”

  Elena locked her finger around the revolver-cuff ’s trigger and aimed it at Gleb. The recoil hit her in the chest.

  But Gleb spun, roaring, positioning his revolver, and she realized she had missed—the revolver-cuff never works as well when it’s not on your wrist—and she ducked, into the frozen marsh-grass. I will spit on his boots as he shoots me.

  An explosion, and Gleb stumbled, dropping his gun, and Elena gasped. Out of the corner of her eye she saw Aleksandr shove Nina towards Elena. Nina’s ringlets flew, and her nostrils flared, and her stained blue coat billowed behind her.

  More gunshots rocked the raised road.

  Screams, and heavy footfalls, and someone gathered her up, seized her beneath the elbows and began to drag her away.

  Aleksandr’s face, sweat dripping from his hairline, eyes wild, loomed next to her. He was dragging her down the road towards the boxcar.

  “Where’s Nina?”

  “Don’t look back.”

  But Elena looked: there, among the prostrate black-coated soldiers, blue lying on the bluish snow, ringlets spilled around her, a spreading puddle of blood and oil.

  Gleb roared behind them. Aleksandr aimed a shot over his shoulder and Gleb howled and fell.

  “Keep running,” Aleksandr said, but all Elena wanted to do was run, run until her burning chest exploded, run until she could no longer run anymore, run until she could arrive at a time before, when her house was whole and she could sit at a table with Mother and Father and Nina, Nina, her poem of a sister who now—

  Elena stumbled and rolled, skidding off the road into the brittle ice of the marshes, her boot crunching into a freezing puddle, snowflakes sticking under her collar. Aleksandr knelt beside her, shoulders stooped.

  “You must still leave,” he said. “You must. Think of what she wanted.”

  Elena raised her head. Aleksandr’s eyes were glazed with tears.

  “She said she wanted to go someplace that smelled like flowers,” he said. “To have her accoutrement removed and forget everything that happened to her here. And, and she wanted you to go too. She said she was afraid for you.”

  Elena cradled the revolver-cuff, crouched in the w
hispering frozen reeds of the marshes.

  Could she cross the border from Russia into a new life of dried roses and Sunday promenades, after letting some physician remove her tail and opera glasses? Could she forget that she had once had a mother and a father and a sister, forget that monsters had taken them from her, forget that a monster had grown inside her too?

  Could she ever allow it all to fade away?

  That’s what Nina would have wanted.

  But she felt her tail flex, feathers grinding on feathers, and she knew: something had broken inside of her forever, no matter if she never saw Russia again.

  “Elena, please, she would have wanted—”

  “My tail is just as much a part of me as her lungs were.” Elena leapt up, on her tiptoes, looming above him so he shrank away.

  She slapped the revolver-cuff over her left wrist. She clenched her teeth as the metal rods curled over her forearm, scraping off her arm hair and digging in, reaching down to her bone. The wood settled against her skin and the trigger fitted into place just above her wrist-bone.

  She shouldered around Aleksandr and marched towards the boxcar. She pushed inside, tore Nina’s shawls off her bunk, rummaged through the carpetbag and pulled out Father’s book of maps of Novgorod. She marked corners of the marshes where she could hide with her revolver-cuff and ambush soldiers, parts of the kremlin wall where she could throw homemade explosives, anywhere she could go to destroy the people who had killed Mother, Father, Nina, who had taken away everything, who had created the dark avenging firebird that could never stop fighting.

  THE EMERALD COAT AND OTHER WISHES

  “I’ll never understand why some people go out of their way to kiss death,” Violet said, the second night I knew her. As she spoke, the presence of the Emerald Coat in the museum behind us crawled down my neck.

  * * *

  I met Violet for the first time when she tiptoed through the museum door in her gray schoolteacher’s dress, trailing the smell of autumn leaves into the antechamber. She pulled her faux-kid gloves off finger by finger as she craned her neck around the mahogany-paneled room. Then her eyes fell on me, sitting at the podium that bars the door leading to the exhibits.