“Trying to sneak in after a night of high jinks? It’s about time you got home,” said the kitten. “Out gallivanting till all hours. Drunk and disorderly, no doubt. You ought to be ashamed of yourselves.”
“Why didn’t you let us in? We could have frozen to death.”
“You always say don’t open the door to strangers. Who could be stranger than you?”
“I’ll wring your scruffy Siberian neck. Move aside.”
The human children climbed out of snow glare into the comfortable dimness of the cottage. The dragon-tooth boy stood below the izba, uncertain.
“What is that?” asked Mewster, twitching whiskers.
The witch said, “His name is Nick-o’-Time, but we call him Nikolai. Don’t just stand there, honeybucket; come inside.”
“Take it from me,” said the kitten through a big fake yawn, “unless you’ve brought the old harridan a present, remember not to eat any food. Or you’ll be sorry.”
“I think dragon-tooth boys don’t eat,” replied Nikolai, climbing up the ladder. The trapdoor shut and bolted itself. An area carpet skittered over it, and a small overwrought table hopped forward and settled itself on the rug, looking pert.
“I am betrayed by my furniture.” The witch sighed. “Also my house pet.”
Mewster snarled, “Serves you right. Question my ability to handle a high-level negotiation? A tiger is no domestic animal. So maybe now you’ll let me join the League of Freed Prisoners and release me to the wild?”
“You still have time to serve. Don’t bother me. We have to plan.”
Benches drew themselves up to be sat upon. Cat rummaged through the supplies she’d brought from Madame Sophia’s kitchen, and served up a steaming pot of hot cocoa. The witch poured it out into chipped cups. Nikolai didn’t take any. Still, a certain vigor bloomed in his face, which was less waxen than rosy now, like the other children.
They didn’t speak for a moment, taking stock. Surviving another hour. Cheeks were apples; clothes were dripping. The smell of wet wool. Baba Yaga stoked the stove. Cat and Elena and Anton looked Nikolai over. All at once they started laughing, all four of them. I cannot begin to say what they thought was funny. I am too far from my own childhood, if ever I had one, to hazard a guess. But even the furniture shook with glee while Baba Yaga’s back was turned.
Rejoining them, the witch said, “First things first. Nikolai, a proposition. Would you be willing to stay here by the ice-dragon and rewind the music box until that old insomniac nods off? Mind, it could take some time. That creature has an agitated sensibility.”
The dragon-tooth boy straightened the sash across his chest. His face had returned to solemnity. “I’d like to stand my post, of course. Like my brother soldiers. But I’m young to decide on a permanent calling. I hope there might be more to being a soldier than turning a key in a music box.”
The witch said, “You may have a point. Still, we’re in a pinch. I admit, the hours are long and there’s little by way of a salary. Yet you’ll have the satisfaction of staying near your old dada, who grew you out of his very own gums and bit you off by accident and spit you out. That’s sort of, um, touching.”
The dragon-tooth boy thought about it. “I don’t know why I should. I didn’t wake him up with noisy fretting over milk and supper and bread and being married to princes and wanting adventure and abducting children out of loneliness.”
The witch’s left eyebrow raised. For a new student to their dilemma, he was catching on fast.
Cat said, “You didn’t wake the ice-dragon up; that’s true. But what choice is there? We can’t stay here to do it. We’re flesh and blood as well as bone. We’d freeze to death.”
Anton liked the newcomer. “It does seem a rum deal, Nick. But as long as there’s someone to turn the key when the mechanism winds down, the music may distract the ice-dragon from the noise of human fretting. It can drift back to sleep, and stop chewing ice and breathing fire upon the ice cap. The floodwater can retreat, and the weather drift back to normal. Crops can grow in their usual way.”
“And you’ll go off and explore the source of the Amazon in the Andes,” said Nikolai to Anton. To Cat, “And you’ll go back to school and learn how to marry a prince if you ever meet one again.” He turned to Elena but just shook his head at her. “In any case, I’m to be excluded from your League of Freed Prisoners.” His face was figuring out how to pout, a skill that comes naturally to the young. “I get to be the hero. Lucky me.”
Cat said, “Nikolai has a point. I think heroism is one of those things that can be shared without diminishing it. What about us?”
The witch examined her fingernails and said in a distracted, ordinary grown-up voice that belied her interest, “What do you mean?”
Cat stared at the ceiling, hunting for words. “Part-time heroes. If Nikolai is willing to help, so should we. As we can.”
The witch spat on the floor. “Doing precisely what?”
“Well … I don’t know yet. But we can think about it.”
“Trust the young to imagine they can improve on human nature. Let me tell you: Sudden understandings at the end of an adventure are a sorry farce. Beware the shattering idealism of the young. Cute, and deadly.”
“Maybe,” said Nikolai. “I’m not human, Mama Yaga, so I don’t know.”
The witch raised her hands to the rafters. Mama Yaga?
“But all right,” continued the dragon-tooth boy, “I’ll help. I’ll start. If the others agree to join in, I’ll put a half-year to start. I’ll stay here till the summer solstice. Give my new friends a few months to see if they can do something. Something real, to reduce the human complaint. I’ll turn the key to the music box shaped like an egg, and I’ll lull the dragon to sleep.”
“Just for a few months.” The witch nodded. “The ice-dragon is supposed to be awake for part of the summer. That’s part of his nature, too.”
“Summer is four months away, enough time to start on setting things right. And though I’m only a milk tooth of a dragon, I have my own life to discover.”
“Well, I like a child who knows his own mind,” said Baba Yaga. “As far as I’m concerned, it’s a deal. Here’s my contribution: I’ll come back at the summer solstice and liberate you. Then you can join the League of Freed Prisoners. We’ll see if these three chuckleheads can make any difference in the world by then. Either way, you’ll have put in your hours. A part-time hero.”
“What will we do then?” asked the dragon-tooth boy. “When summer arrives?”
The witch looked if she thought she might be coming down with something. She chewed her words like a gum arabic before speaking them. “My other visitors are going to have to go home eventually. After these adventures with them, I may find my old life as a hermit somewhat lacking in smack. Boring, even. So I’ve been thinking it might be time to have a baby. I was going to call it Baby Yaga. But maybe I’ll just adopt. Would you be my new boy?”
The hummingbird dropped dead, and Mewster was too shocked even to pounce for a bite. The table got down on its knees. The wardrobe door flew open, and the mirror showed a reflection of Baba Yaga with a fistful of balloons on strings and a basket of candy canes, toy soldiers, gingerbread dragons, and pistols.
Cat looked put out. Anton mouthed the words, It’s not fair. But Elena was relieved at the thought of being released to go home.
The dragon-tooth boy said, “A dragon for a father and a witch for a mother? I’ll think about it, Mama Yaga.”
“Hey!” Even Mewster was sputtering. “What about me?”
“You,” said Baba Yaga, “I’m not even talking to you yet. I’ll let you loose in the wild when I’m good and ready. Gather your hairballs and let yourself out. I need you to pull Dumb Doma home.” The witch snagged the floating nest from midair and retrieved the Fabergé egg from it. “If we’re doing this, let’s finish it before I get soppy. Here you are, Nikolai. You know where the door is.”
The dragon-tooth boy stood at attention
. He was only a boy, after all. But he accepted the Fabergé egg from the witch. He examined it. “I see your house, Mama Yaga,” he said, “and here is my father, Žmey-Aždaja. And here is the Firebird’s egg.”
They all peered. In that window where recently they had seen deadwood and rot, a little porcelain egg rested in a patch of porcelain ferns.
Nikolai inserted the key in a slot in the wooden base and wound up the music box. The egg revolved. Firebird, witch, ice-dragon. A plinkety melody sounded and sounded again.
The dragon-tooth boy bit his lip and blinked a couple of times, quickly.
“I shall not forget you,” he said to them all. “This egg will remind me all through my springtime. And I shall try to do my best.”
The three human children promised to do the same.
But what was their best? What actually did they mean to do? Three young human beings not yet reached the legal age for marriage? How to be a part-time hero when you were still young enough to be sent to your room for misbehavior?
They didn’t know. It had something to do with trying, though. Trying to limit their own greedy I wants. Maybe trying to help satisfy someone else’s needy I wants. Do without their green silk gowns, sell a palace or two, supply some fretful infants a honeybucket’s worth of goat’s milk. Give away some of the nuts and mushrooms found in the forest. Offer someone the extra length of cotton, the spare broom.
Sharing by turns or sharing by portions or sharing by common holding — or they’d do without, and share the nothing equally.
All they could do was make a start. Then, when the Fabergé music-box egg finally broke, maybe they’d have reduced the chorus of I wants just enough for Žmey-Aždaja to sleep through the winter as an ice-dragon ought. Help return the cranky imperious world to its own cranky imperious balance.
A tall order. Probably impossible. An irresponsible fairy tale.
But I want it to turn out to be true. I do. I want, I want.
Baba Yaga clicked her fingers. A staircase unfolded out of the wall. She rushed up the steps and rummaged about in an impromptu attic, returning with a set of leather reins stitched with jingle bells. Suddenly no carping or comedy, all business. “Let’s wave our good-byes to the North. Farewell, Nikolai. I hope the key in the egg doesn’t break.”
“Of course it will,” said the dragon-tooth boy. “Anything that can happen will happen, sooner or later. The question is whether or not the world can be made ready.”
Then he bowed formally, for his green-and-white wool uniform was stiff with newness. He took the glossy egg that Madame Sophia had ordered for the Tsar. He didn’t look at the humans as he marched to the door.
They grabbed their fur coats and followed him. The sun was nearly behind the horizon. Quickly outpacing his shivering friends, he marched toward the menacing creature, and he didn’t look back. Soon they could hear the tinkling sound of the music box in the icy air. Music over snow is like prisms tinkling from some drafty dining room of long ago.
As Baba Yaga used the reins to hitch Mewster to the front of Dumb Doma, the children walked a few feet away to catch a last look at Žmey-AŽdaja.
A great Russian writer remarked that once you have looked closely at the drawing in which an artist has hidden some objects to be found, and you’ve discovered them, it is impossible to un-see them. Now that the children knew what they were looking at, it was hard to believe they hadn’t recognized the great hump-backed ridge as an ice-dragon lying against the shore of the harbor.
The short northern day was nearly done already. Žmey-AŽdaja was close to dozing, frosty flanks gleaming against the coming night. The slope of his snout was angling toward them now. He seemed to be curling up more tightly, like a borzoi on a hearth rug.
For the first time, they could see both of his eyes. They were heavy-lidded. Only a deep glow, the sort one might mistake as a reflection of sunset, betrayed the life in the hillside.
Žmey-AŽdaja didn’t speak again. It seemed to Elena, though, as if he nodded the most discreet of acknowledgments. Perhaps she was succumbing to being fanciful again. She should watch out for that.
Still, Elena supposed that an ice-dragon has little practice in thanking guests for presents. This, then, was something of an effort. She waved. The part-time hero was already stepping over the other side of the dragon’s forearm, distributing the lullaby of the porcelain egg. He looked forlorn. A toy soldier set out upon a snowbank.
The fate of the world shouldn’t rest on a single set of shoulders. The others would have to get to work. So, with Cat on one side and Anton on the other, Elena returned to the front doorstep of Dumb Doma.
“I don’t suppose that when a large wrong has been set a little right, everything else sorts itself out in perfect order,” said Cat to Baba Yaga.
“I don’t know,” said the witch. “I signed up for a correspondence course in dental hygiene, which taught me that careful brushing removed the rust from my iron teeth, but I never did receive any invitations to the Friday-night barbecue at Marie Antoinette’s. One’s bite, for good or for ill, doesn’t change much through life. One gets what one gets.”
Elena said, “But we have a chance now. Don’t we?”
“Well, there’s always a chance,” said the witch, “if you believe in chances. I myself am governed by destiny. And it hasn’t escaped my attention that the Firebird’s egg is still missing. What that means to the spirit of Russian magic, who knows. Cat, when you get back to London, remember to look up Sherlock Holmes and engage him to solve the Case of the Purloined Egg. Get inside, honeybuckets. It’s time to go.”
“Where are we going?” asked Anton, his face falling.
“Back to Saint Petersburg. If this strategy works, you three can claim you helped still the floods, at least for a time. Maybe in thanks, the Tsar will issue a pardon to Elena.”
“How are we going to get back? Even you can’t hail a passing tornado.”
“Mewster will pull us.” She went to the front door and called out, “Mush, baby, mush.”
“Mush yourself,” called Mewster, tangled in reins. “Which way should we go?”
“How should I know? I couldn’t find my own house if I didn’t bring it along with me wherever I went. Elena?” The witch looked at the girl, who took the matryoshka out of her pocket. She didn’t open it, just stroked the doll’s head.
“Which way?” replied Elena. “Home.”
So Mewster swelled to the size of a great white Siberian snow tiger and began to pace along the rim of the harbor, looking for a dip between hills in which he could turn to the south.
The ride was bumpy. Dumb Doma had to run to keep up with Mewster. Anton mentioned that skiing in Switzerland was a smoother ride than this. Baba Yaga agreed. “Giant chicken feet aren’t designed for cross-country marathons. I must have a pair of skis somewhere.” She poked about in a cupboard, but all she turned up was a tennis racket, its strings chewed out by mice. “This is no good. We’ll have to make a sled. Wardrobe, come here; your time is done. I’m going to take you apart with this hammer.” But the wardrobe ran and hid its face in the corner and wouldn’t come out.
“Tarnation pudding,” said Baba Yaga. “Well, honeybuckets, help me unscrew this trapdoor we just noticed. We’ll slap it on the ground and Dumb Doma can balance on it, and it’ll work as a kind of toboggan.”
She ordered the table and carpet to scurry away. Then she passed around screwdrivers and a crowbar. They went to work at the stubborn door. “I have the most … opinionated … household,” grunted the witch. “Home ownership is not for the timid. On the count of three. One … two …”
She didn’t say three, and the children said, “Oh!”
“Well, looky-looky,” said the witch.
When the trapdoor flew open, a brightness seared their corneas. You can guess what they found, not hanging in midair but nested in a wooden cradle beneath the house, like a secret box slotted underneath a tabletop.
“That drawer wasn’t there when I
was lying under the house,” said Elena. And it seemed to her that the obscure figures that sometimes haunted the walls of Dumb Doma, figures mounted upon one another in stacks and columns, opened their mouths not in horror but in relief.
Anton said, “But my godfather sent the Firebird’s egg to his treasury. How did it get here?”
Cat figured it out. “Don’t you remember? Dumb Doma drifting downriver beside the pavilions. We saw her — but no one else did.”
“I bet it was that cat,” said the witch. “I bet Mewster made a leap, and slipped under the awnings of the treasury tent, and made off with the Firebird’s egg while we were all chewing the fat with the Tsar. Why didn’t he tell us?”
She ran to the front door. “Mewster! We found the Firebird’s egg!”
The great cat was laboring to drag Dumb Doma upslope. On either side, the army of dragon’s teeth was marching along as sprightly as possible given the deep snow. Short of breath, Mewster managed to growl, “You couldn’t find honey in a bucket, honeybucket.”
“It’s not my fault I don’t have my best spectacles anymore!” she screamed. “But why did you take it?”
He answered, “You’re the only one who wants a companion? You kidnap me and hold me hostage — you filch children lost in the woods — and you think Dumb Doma doesn’t also have a maternal instinct in its wooden chicken-hearted breast? After all these years, it was feeling broody. It wanted an egg to sit on. So I found one. So what?”
“But you could have upset the balance of the universe!”
“So could we all,” he replied. “You too, witch.”
Baba Yaga wanted to candle the egg and make sure the Firebird was in embryo therein, but the egg was almost too warm to touch. Maybe that was a good sign.
The witch called the Firebird’s nest from where it hovered near the ceiling, and the nest took the glowing egg as if it was purpose-built to hold such a relic. Which it was.
“Now everything is perfect,” said Baba Yaga. “Someone sing a fatuous victory anthem, and we can all go home.”
Egg & Spoon Page 31