Rosa and the Veil of Gold

by Kim Wilkins

  He needs only to make Mokosha agree.

  Mokosha is the most powerful woman in Skazki. Of the six old gods, Mokosha is the only female, an immortal and ever-beautiful deity. For centuries, women of Mir shed the blood of animals to appeal for her help in conception and childbirth. Since the separation of the lands, more and more turn to the Christian deity in prayer and Mokosha finds herself bored. She lives in a dark stone house by a river in one of the thrice-nine lands of Skazki, where she watches out the window in hope of something more than the swinging of branches to catch her eye. Like all of the old gods, she is content to stay in Skazki. It is only the hunting creatures—the witches and demons of place—who cross between the worlds for prey.

  When the Secret Ambassador arrives, she is already waiting at the door for him. “Come in,” she says, grasping his hand and pulling him inside. Little bells tinkle; charms hanging over the threshold. Mokosha is dressed in flowing robes of black, decorated with fur and snakeskin. A necklace of bird skulls is wound twice around her long pale throat. Her coal-black hair is unbound and falls around her sharp face and broad shoulders. “Sit with me, Koschey,” she says, offering him a chair. “Tell me of life beyond these windows.”

  The Secret Ambassador brushes snow off his coat and takes a seat. The room is cluttered and dark, filled with collections of twigs and stones and skulls. The fire is high and hot, sending shadows fluttering around the room. Surrounding him are smells he cannot distinguish one from another: herbs and dried flowers and female smells and moist earth and other things, other things which remind him of long-ago pleasures and willing lovers whose arms have long since crumbled to dust.

  “In Mir, a young man has come to the throne of Russia.”

  “Will he ask us to return?”

  “I fear not. His father and his grandfather would not hear of it. The Church has them all in thrall, but I know a way we can insinuate ourselves without anything so obvious as an invitation to return.”

  Mokosha sits on a wooden stool by the fire and leans forward eagerly. Her icy grey eyes are wide. “How?”

  “A marriage.”

  The Secret Ambassador knows that Mokosha has already guessed the rest of the plan. She tilts her head to one side, eyes narrowed. “I will not do it.”

  “You are the only one.”

  Her voice is indignant. “I am an immortal being.”

  “And so you will outlive him. You need only marry him, bear his children, then return to Skazki upon his death.”

  “Human children?” She shudders with revulsion. “No, no. You must ask somebody else.”

  “There is nobody else to ask.”

  “Take a russalka, any one of them would do.”

  “The russalki are all under ice until spring. He intends to marry within weeks. Besides, they are unpredictable and foolish. They will drown their own children. They will disappear on moonlit nights, and pine for the water until they go mad.”

  “Someone else then.”

  “Mokosha, the blood of men and magic barely mix. It is you alone of all of us, magical creature of fertility and birth, who would be able to bear children in Mir.” He inclines his head in deference. “And it must be somebody beautiful. Somebody who we can be certain he will choose from a crowd of virgins.”

  Mokosha stands and paces, and the Secret Ambassador is put in mind of a caged wolf.

  “I am to be paraded like a milking cow then?” she says. “Should I allow my teats to be unbound so he may inspect them more carefully?”

  “I know it is so far beneath you. I know it is an insult. It could almost be a joke. But it isn’t.” He imbues his voice with all the gravity he can muster. “It is our hope for the future.”

  She turns, wrapping her arms around herself. “I am a god,” she says softly. “How am I to submit to life in Mir as a woman? Women are ranked so low. Those that defy their husbands are buried alive. The ones who live are beleaguered with trivial tasks. How am I to concern myself with whether a jar and a spoon should be stored upside-down or right-side-up?”

  “It is only for a brief time. And then your blood will be mixed with the blood of Russia’s ruling family. As long as the blood passes along, parent to child, we have a knot which binds us to Mir, and we cannot slip away completely.”

  Her mouth turns down in an expression both miserable and angry. “There is nobody else?”

  “Nobody, Mokosha. You know that.” He pulls her to her seat, folding her hands in his. “Our world rests upon your shoulders.”

  “Don’t. That isn’t a fair thing to say.”

  “It is the truth.”

  A minute ticks past, and her breath is troubled. She sighs and shifts, then says, “How would it be done?”

  The Secret Ambassador feels the wall of resistance give. Relief makes the words stumble too fast from his mouth. “A boyar family in Moscow lost their daughter last year. They are willing to have you pose as her, so long as the marriage proceeds. Neighbours and friends who knew the dead girl will be rewarded for their silence. All will enjoy new standing with the Tsar. Her name was Stasya and this will be your new name. Stasya Romanovna.”

  “And the children?”

  “Bear as many as you can. Let your blood flow far and wide in the important families of Russia. When Ivan dies, you may return to Skazki and continue as you always have.”

  Mokosha, nervous energy tingling in her legs, stands again and goes to the window. Hushed snow is falling on her roof, and over all the woods and streams for miles. The land is frozen as it is every year at this time, but it always thaws. The years always swing in and out, decades always pass. Time is not a thing to be feared when one is immortal; it is the enemy only of those whose death rushes towards them with every stuttered tick. Mokosha breathes and ponders while the Secret Ambassador waits in hope.

  “I see I have little choice,” she says at last.

  “No, Mokosha. It is still your choice.”

  She turns from the window. “Don’t call me Mokosha,” she says. “You may call me Stasya.”

  Mokosha, now Stasya, has changed more than her name by the time she arrives at the Kremlin to meet Ivan. Using a mixture of herbs and magic, she has dyed her hair ash-white, and has adopted the coloured silk robes of a noblewoman rather than the rough natural fabrics of a pagan goddess. She wears a sarafan decorated in stars and moons, and an elaborate covering upon her head, its long veil of blue damask skimming behind her. In the Cross Chamber, Ivan’s reception room up high in the Terem Palace, she queues with more than a hundred other girls.

  This competition brings her so low that she feels she could scream. The idiot girls around her are full of giggles and false compliments, but Stasya refuses to talk to any of them. She is a god, for all that she pretends to be an ordinary young woman; nor is there anything ordinary about her beauty. She is otherworldly, pale and noble, with haunting eyes, but even this won’t be enough to ensure Ivan selects her for his wife, because love is notoriously ill-sighted.

  No, the Secret Ambassador has been very careful not to leave Ivan’s choice to fate. Instead, he has cloaked Stasya—crown to toes—in magical glamour. There is no chance of the young Tsar choosing another.

  Though Stasya secretly hopes he might.

  The ceiling in the Cross Chamber is low, and the deeply-recessed windows mean that no light illuminates the decorated corners. The arches are painted, the portals are intricately carved, the dark timber furniture merges into the shadows. Candles in the alcoves provide the flickering light, and fill the air with a warm wax smell. Here is where the bear sits, on a chest of ebony. The bear recognises Stasya as a visitor from the land of her birth, and is excited that Ivan might choose Stasya for his bride.

  Face after beautiful face passes before Ivan, who feigns boredom even though he doesn’t feel it; he has the vanity of a young man. He is surrounded by boyars in their long hats and richly-embroidered kaftans urging him to pick this one or that one, to heed this family or another. Ivan wants to marry the
most beautiful, the most noble, the most able to bear his sons and establish his dynasty.

  His hands on the edges of his carved chair, he extends his neck and shoulders forward, and the bear is put in mind of a vulture. His hooded black eyes flick left and right, scanning the face and body of a boyar’s daughter, then dismissing her with a flip of his right index finger.

  “Not this one,” he says.

  Her family gather around her as she weeps. The bear knows she is weeping with relief.

  And on down the line. “Not this one.” “Not that one.” “Not her.”

  Until finally Stasya steps before Ivan. She is unsure what she should do. A number of the other girls have smiled at him, or asked after his health. She remains silent and stone-faced as she ponders on the correct way to address him.

  “Your majesty,” his aide says to him, “this is Stasya, daughter of Roman Yurievich Zakharin.”

  Stasya meets his eye. She parts her lips to greet him, then sees the sudden transformation of his expression: love and desire have seized him. “It is all my joy to meet you, Stasya Romanovna,” he says.

  Stasya feels something inside her shift. She is falling, she has lost control of her fate. She holds on to her breath, as though it may be the last one breathed as a free woman.

  “Have you anything you would like to say to me, child?” Ivan says.

  Stasya wants to shout at this boy, “I am not a child.” She does not. Instead, she says, “How long do you think you will live, Ivan Vasilevich?”

  Ivan blinks slowly, then a smile comes to his face. “I shall live at least another fifty years, maybe sixty.”

  “I have sixty years to spare you, then,” she says, “if you’d care to marry me.”

  A murmur runs about the room, a number of the boyars are frowning their disapproval. Ivan turns to his aide and nods decisively.

  “This one,” he says.

  On her wedding night, Stasya takes the Golden Bear into the cavernous royal bedchamber as a reminder of the world she has left behind. From among the cushions and furs of the canopied bed it gives her comfort to gaze upon the oddly-decorated creature, and the bear feels the pleasure of being loved for the first time in many centuries.

  The bear sits atop an ivory casket and watches as time passes, as Stasya’s belly grows and expels a human child, a little girl named Anna. Of course, Stasya has borne many children before. Most of the witches and wizards of Skazki grew in her womb and came screeching from her body on windy nights. They suckled roughly at her breasts for one evening then, grown to full size, ran from her cottage into the wide dawn to make their mischief. Stasya felt nothing for any of those creatures, and expects to feel nothing for the human spawn. In fact, she expects to feel revulsion. It is only natural to fear difference in such a way.

  Surrounded by silent nurses and bloodied sheets, Stasya holds the little child in her arms. It is pink and helpless, with Ivan’s heavy brow and Stasya’s long fingers. Stasya counts the fingers, each tiny digit as soft and light as moonbeams. She is overwhelmed by feelings of vulnerability, as though the child’s helplessness is contagious. In an instant, Stasya falls in love with her daughter, and this act, this terrifying weakness, changes something in her fibres and sinews. The bear can sense it. Stasya is becoming human.

  What woe, what grief and horror, when the child dies before its first birthday. And then another, Maria, only a year later. And then a third, Dmetri, dropped by a careless nurse into the river. The constant cycle of elation and grief wears Stasya like rapid water wears a stone. She becomes smaller and harder, she loses her texture.

  Ivan loves Stasya dearly, and thinks more children will cure her melancholy. “We have lost three,” he says, “but perhaps the next three will live long and be happy. We must try again.”

  So her belly swells for a fourth time, but now the boyars talk in whispers about Stasya. They suspect she is a witch.

  “She poisons her children through witchcraft.”

  “My wife says she spoiled and tangled the wool when she came visiting.”

  “She has an unearthly gleam in her eye.”

  “The Metropolitan says she shows no interest in prayers.”

  “She hangs nettles in her bedchamber.”

  “Ravens gather at her window.”

  So it goes on, until opinion of her is tainted like good soup with bad meat. She confines herself for the entire pregnancy in the bedchamber. Long shadows in the dusty sunshine are all the sights to see from her bed, where she sleeps and waits and waits and sleeps. Her sleep is often punctuated with awful dreams of dead babies: sometimes the infants are pink and slick with birth blood, but deafeningly silent; sometimes they are pale and blue and cold, dusted with the soil of the grave; sometimes it is simply a dream of a heartbeat fading to awful stillness, and she wakes with a start and pounds her own heart to make sure it still beats. The life inside her stretches and kicks blithely. There are no guarantees for this child, there is no comfort for Stasya in numerical probabilities. It may die, just like the others. She cannot endure not knowing its fate.

  Although the rumours of magic endanger her, she turns to that forbidden craft in her moment of desperate uncertainty.

  Stasya leaves the Kremlin as the sun rises on the melting snow. It has been a mild winter, and the markets are opening early for spring. She ignores the stares of those she passes, who are amazed to see the Tsar’s pregnant wife trudging over the uneven ground in a brocade housecoat and furs, her long ash hair unbound. Down the hill and towards the river, the market becomes a melange of animal smells and noises. Peasants shudder in the cold and children curl in balls next to green fires while their mothers wash clothes on the river’s edge. At the end of a long row of miserable goods proffered by miserable folk, eight miserable sheep in a pen bleat their wretchedness to the dawn cold.

  “My child,” she whispers, crossing her right hand over her belly, “which one of these beasts will tell me what will happen to you?”

  “Are you going to buy one or not?” a grubby man in layers of brown rags asks her.

  She turns to admonish him for speaking so to the Tsaritsa, then holds her tongue. A shivering child clings to his side, a girl of about eight with a thin, haunted expression. Neither this girl nor her ill-tempered father know who Stasya is. All noblewomen look the same to them: well-dressed, well-fed and warm. Other distinguishing features—eyes, lips or hair—are incidental.

  “That one,” she says, indicating a ram at the back of the pen. “I’ll pay a good price for him.” The child gasps as Stasya produces a handful of silver coins to pour into his palm.

  Through the shivering dawn streets, Stasya leads the sheep back to the Terem Palace. Whispers follow her. Why is such a noblewoman out buying a dirty sheep? Isn’t that the Tsaritsa? I’ve heard she practises the old ways. This confirms it, for why would the Tsaritsa select her own sheep unless it is for augury? Augury with a ram’s shoulder! Then she is as ungodly as rumour tells.

  Augury is a language learned in Stasya’s infancy, embodied in her muscles and bones like ancient memory. She clears all the servants out of the hollow kitchen and secures the doors. It has been a long time now since she performed any magic, and many things have changed. She fears that the woman she once was—Mokosha, the goddess—is buried so deep in human suffering that she will never again be free. But the magic warms her fingers and expands up into her muscles, supple and strong as ever. She kills the ram and hacks bloody shoulders from its body, throws them on the hot coals and waits for the meat to soften and lift. Stasya’s hands are covered in blood, her fine shoes are sticky with it. She crouches at the stove like a vulgar witch and pokes at the hunk of meat. It falls away, exposing the white bone. Stasya peers at the bone, looking for marks and notches. The charred meat smells bitter, mingling with the metallic stink of the blood on the floor. She focuses her eyes, hot and dry from the fire, and opens up that second sight with which she was infused in the moment she sprang from Mother Moist Earth.

>   On the ram’s shoulder a long notch and a smaller beside it. Ivan and the child: a boy. She is not in the scene. Ivan holds something above his head—a staff? With the iron poker, she turns the other bone. Here, the next scene. The child lies upon the ground, his father crouched over him in a position of grief.

  Dead, then? Killed by his own father?

  “By all the stars, no!” Stasya sits on the floor and weeps helpless tears. The child inside her is already doomed. Blood seeps into her skirts, and a hesitant knock brings her back to reality. Stasya touches her belly and knows this tide of feeling has swept her away, too far. She grows more human every day, and with that, more mortal. She climbs to her feet and unbolts the heavy wooden door. Outside in the gloomy corridor, four servants wait for her.

  Stasya gestures with bloody hands towards the ram’s carcass. “Use every part,” she says. “The skin for a coat, the entrails for the table, the breast for soup. Stuff the kidneys, roast the ribs, boil the feet, and fry the liver with onion. Leave nothing for any to find.”

  One of the servants shrinks away from her. Another, her Church faith making her too bold, says, “And the shoulders, lady? Shall we stuff them with eggs?”

  Stasya drills her index finger into the woman’s collarbone and mutters, “You shall not tell a soul.” With an icy stare which she hopes will frighten them into silence, Stasya leaves and winds up the dark, narrow stairs to wash away the blood.

  The Secret Ambassador visits from time to time. Ivan is mistrustful of him, knowing by now where he is from. Although Ivan thinks the godless folk belong in godless country and not here at court, he loves his wife and knows that the Secret Ambassador cheers her bouts of melancholy. Over the years, Stasya confesses to the Secret Ambassador all her concerns. The Secret Ambassador listens, nods and hums in sympathy, but is unmoved. She must stay in Mir, she must keep bearing children.