“Not so fast,” called Mewster through the open front door. “Weren’t you making a sledge for the house? I’m already exhausted, and we haven’t even made it up the first slope.”
“Oh, right,” said Baba Yaga. She lifted the hatch from where they had set it. The floor had already healed over. There was no evidence of a secret entrance. No hidden drawer. She sighed. “This house needs therapy.” Then she ran to the front door and slapped the trapdoor out onto the snow. “Dumb Doma! Roost on that rectangle of wood and keep your balance, and we’ll all have an easier time of it.”
The dark had swept in for good by now. They caught a glimpse of the full moon that, the previous night, had raised up an army out of the planted teeth of Žmey-Aždaja. The marching was slow. Those soldiers were made to fight, not to wade through three feet of snowdrifts.
“What’s that?” asked Elena. She pointed ahead.
The horizon had become lumpy, a moving silhouette, like gear teeth laid on a long curve. The teeth weren’t sharp, but rounded. Was it the ice-dragon’s tabbed spine? Had Žmey-Aždaja changed its mind, broken loose, circled around to ambush them? More and more shapes rising over the brow of the slope, the huge moon behind them providing both contrast and glare.
As the moon rose higher and the light strengthened, the hulking, bobbing shapes came nearer. They weren’t a single backbone but separate entities. “It looks hostile for a welcoming committee,” said Baba Yaga. “I doubt it’s the Saami Sámi Lapi, who are a peaceable people. Maybe it’s a battalion of some sort to keep us from returning. We’ll get closer and have a better look.”
By their hesitation, it seemed that the indigenous tribe had noticed the awkward sledge of Dumb Doma pulled by Mewster, and the army that flanked them on either side.
The brigade began to swarm down the slope toward the League of Freed Prisoners with wild, high-pitched ululations. It chilled the blood to hear it.
A little light,” said the witch. “Where are my skulls? Caligula and Robespierre! And Benedict Arnold, Tallulah Bankhead, whoever you are, I can’t remember. Open your lighted eye sockets, we need your help.”
The skulls rolled out from underneath the bed. The witch said to the children, “What are you waiting for? Come on, grab a noggin. We’ll repair to the roof and see what we can see.”
A folding ladder obligingly unpacked itself from the ceiling. The children and the witch scrambled up. They found themselves on a narrow landing facing a gable with a casement window. “So this is where my window seat went,” said the witch. “I can’t decide if Dumb Doma is treacherous or just forgetful. Come on, out we go.”
They clambered over the cushions and through the window. Once there, they inched around the gutters and trim until there was a sentry stationed at each corner of the izba’s steep roof. The witch called, “At my command, lift your skulls high and hold them out. We’ll blind these newcomers, giving our army the advantage.”
“I hope they take it,” said Anton. “They’ve had no military training.”
“They’re born soldiers. They’ll know what to do. Ready, steady, go.”
They each lifted a skull.
The radiance from the bony eye sockets grew in strength and became beacons. The wailing of the approaching army mounted to a higher key. It was joined by the roar of the soldiers, readying for the fray.
“Oh, mercy cut us a little slack,” shouted Baba Yaga. “It’s those pesky matryoshkas, come to plague us! Let loose an enchantment, honeybuckets, and it stays loose. It wants to follow its own track. I want, I want in the magic kingdom. Watch out, the battle is joined now!”
The dragon-tooth army was pelting forward through the snow, falling on their knees in their haste. They threw down their bayonets in favor of making snowballs, and pitched them at the bevy of matryoshkas. The snowballs fragmented into snow dust before impact. Fully risen but one tip still grazing the horizon, the moon now looked like the supreme snowball of the galaxy.
The dolls drew nearer, sliding with verve and control. Their rounded bottoms skidded over the top of the ice and didn’t break through, didn’t hobble their progress as the men’s was hobbled.
“I have a nasty feeling about this,” said Baba Yaga. “The strategies of this sort of war are inappropriate for young eyes to see! Close your eyes, kiddos!” Did any one of the children obey? I ask you.
In his harness, Mewster turned and growled up at the witch on the roof. “When hearts collide … Where’s your fiddle, witch?”
“I don’t do romance!” cried the witch. “Never could stand the stuff!”
“Oh, yuck,” said Cat. “We barely escape from the marriage market that the Tsar was running …”
“You said it. From an engagement ball to a rodeo at the Kissypoo Corral.”
The battle was being joined. The cry of the matryoshkas wasn’t a battle alarum but a shriek of delight. Nor had the soldiers been roaring to give themselves courage under fire but to return the signal of approval.
Now that they’d been out in the world a few days, the matryoshkas had become differentiated. Though they were still shaped like pins for a game of skittles, with no arms except those painted on their curved sides, the colors of their garments varied, and their faces had grown individual. This one had a blond curl painted across her forehead; that one had more hooded eyes, smeared with kohl. A third had a serene expression like an ikon of a saint; another featured a saucy wink.
Each of the dragon-tooth soldiers met a Russian doll he found toothsome. Each soldier threw his arms around the neck of the doll where her pear shape began to taper into her rounded conical head. His fingers just met around the sides, and a wild northern dance of matrimony began. Sometimes he was planted on this ground, his booted feet spread wide and turning, and he was hoisting his partner in the air, her lacquered bottom shining red and black and blue in the skull-light. Then she was planted again in the snow and spinning, and her soldier wheeled about, legs in the air like fringe, revolving around her. Their joy was contagious, at least to the children, who clapped and hollered. Baba Yaga jeered.
Once the moon went down, the dragon-tooth soldiers and their matryoshka brides stopped dancing. The League of Freed Prisoners and the witch watched as the soldiers lifted off the heads of their chosen dolls and climbed inside, pulling the doll heads down upon them like lids upon a jar. The dolls fell in line behind Dumb Doma.
The stars came out. A host of spangles: yellow, periwinkle blue, white.
They made Elena mindful of something, but what, she couldn’t remember.
Anton wasn’t given to flushes of emotion. He didn’t think of stars as beautiful, administrative, or celestial chemical accidents. He thought of them as background to adventure. Maybe the only suitable background.
Cat thought of being packed off back to school, and the stars didn’t help. You couldn’t see stars very well over London.
“We’re off,” said the witch, and they went inside.
Only a little more need be said about their return journey. Often enough, Mewster was able to find frozen slicks along valley floors. Now that Dumb Doma could balance on its trapdoor sled, Mewster could make impressive speeds. The army of matryoshkas carrying their cargo of husbands whisked along behind. Now and then, overturning on a curve, the dolls would squeal in joy but bob back up and hurry on.
Baba Yaga stoked the furnace with birch wood and sat down nearby. With a dainty set of embroidery scissors, she went at a sheaf of brightly colored origami papers. The shreds tangled in Mewster’s whiskers. The witch said she was snipping a portrait of her son’s personal history, the circumstances in which he had come to be born. She would lay it under an oval of glass after the glue was dry.
The missing window seat had obligingly reappeared opposite the stove, so the children squeezed themselves onto it. They wanted to harvest every last glimpse of cold and mystery before it was gone for good. They didn’t speak for now.
Once, Anton tapped his finger on the glass. He pointed, and the gi
rls peered. They thought they saw the figure of Myandash at the base of a snowy knoll. A figure like a totem, like a tree trunk topped by a rack of antlers. The figure raised one arm in a sort of salute. At the end of his fist sat a snowy owl.
Myandash may only have been gesturing to Mewster, but three children each put a palm on the glass, three lifelines.
Little by little, the North became far away again. So does all memory, unless you write it down.
They didn’t know how near they might be to Archangel, and whether Mewster would try to skirt the outpost or lead a dawn invasion of dolls through the streets of that city. At first light, as Mewster dragged Dumb Doma and her passengers around the brow of a low but wide-flung hill, they saw in the distance what they took to be an ice fortress.
“One prohibition after another,” said Baba Yaga. “Does no one want us to return? Why has the Tsar caused an outpost to be built in this barren hinterland?”
They drew nearer. As the sun rose, they saw that the structure wasn’t as big or solid as it had first seemed. It looked like an armory of snowballs for the next playful skirmish between the soldiers and the matryoshkas.
“What fresh caprice is this?” asked the witch. She opened Dumb Doma’s door and shouted to Mewster, “Let’s have a look, but be careful in case there’s someone treacherous behind that mound of ammunition, waiting to ambush us.”
Mewster slowed his pace. They saw no sign of life as they drew close to the ziggurat of artillery. Then Elena let out a cry. “I do believe I know who that is. Up top, can you make it out?”
Cat and Anton and the witch strained to see. The black fur cap of a lone soldier peering out from behind the ramparts? Then they realized that the cap was strutting by itself and that it wasn’t a cap at all but a small, homely creature. Looking proud of herself.
“Is that a hen?” asked Baba Yaga. “In the frozen North? However possible?”
“It’s the hen of the tundra.” Elena, laughing and clapping her hands: “Those aren’t thousands of snowballs, but eggs! Her eggs! I’d recognize that hen anywhere. So I didn’t imagine it. She’s the one who was flushed out of the forest by the fox. She zipped into the clearing as I was trying to snatch the Firebird’s feather, and … and she took hold of the feather with her beak before I could get there. She was in the jaws of death, and she must have made a chicken wish … to live long enough to lay one more egg.”
“If these are all hers,” said Anton, “then she’s lived to lay about ten thousand more eggs. She’s a very busy little hen.”
“Yes,” said Baba Yaga, “but ‘one more’ is always the next one. So she’ll always live to lay one more egg. And then one more. And then one more.”
The chicken had laid about six eggs while they were watching. She didn’t seem at all tired or bored, just tidied the eggs into her stockpile.
“She’s still young. She won’t be able to lay at that rate forever,” said Baba Yaga. “But it seems that she’ll always be able to lay one more.”
They came to a halt at the bottom of the wall. It was time to get out and stretch their legs. A spicy clarity in the air, redolent of the fir forests to the south. The tree line wouldn’t be far away now.
“Little hen,” said Elena, “are you from Miersk originally? One of our own? You were lost in the woods and chased by a fox, and you found the Firebird. And now we’ve found you.” She put up her hands, a gesture of family feeling.
The hen regarded Elena with a dubious eye. She began to back away, making the hawking, embarrassed chuckle of a confused hen — the only kind of hen there is. Then she cocked her head and noticed Dumb Doma.
The house was dancing up and down on her giant chicken legs. Snow came flying off the roof in great puffs. Dumb Doma preened and scratched. The hen of the tundra hurtled off her giant storehouse of eggs. She tumbled down the slope and approached Dumb Doma as a chick will race toward its mother.
“Dumb Doma wanted an egg,” said Mewster. “That’s why I took the Firebird’s egg for her. But it seems she’d be happy to adopt.”
“So our party grows,” said Baba Yaga. “Well, Madame Hen, you’re welcome to join us. But we haven’t got room for your warehouse of eggs.”
The hen didn’t seem to mind. She roosted upon the makeshift sled between Dumb Doma’s feet. She stared at them, conveying little in the way of an opinion, twitching her head in that staccato way of hens worldwide, and perhaps universal, for all I know.
What did she see in them? I don’t know. Birds are my eyes, but hens are inscrutable.
So Baba Yaga corralled the children, and they climbed back into the izba. Then the house on chicken legs, and the witch with iron teeth, and the four skulls, and Mewster the enchanted snow tiger, and the army of matryoshkas bearing their beloved cargo of dragon-tooth soldiers, and the unborn Firebird in its glowing egg, and the immortal hen of the tundra living to bear one more egg, and Anton Antonovich Romanov, the distant cousin and godson of the Tsar, and Ekaterina Ivanovna de Robichaux, the wealthy French-Russian girl being schooled in London, and Elena Maximovna Rudina, a peasant girl from Miersk, prepared to leave the world of ice magic behind.
On the outskirts of Archangel, the company paused.
The city huddled brown and grey against the plain. Human roads again, and clutches of low gnarled trees struggling to stand upright against the wind off the steppes. It was very early morning either the next day or the next after that.
Clutching a scarlet plush tarantula, Baba Yaga was snoring in her trundle bed.
The children were already awake. They felt the end of their adventures approaching, perhaps the end of their friendships. They wanted to treasure every moment before the magic evaporated and they were dumped back on the several floors of their hard lives.
Cat and Anton agreed that their lives had promise as well as perplexity.
Cat: “I wasn’t interested in meeting any cousin and godson of the Tsar, even though my great-aunt thought it might be my ticket of rescue from a life of abandonment by my parents. I thought the Tsar’s godson would be old and fat and leering, and smell of cherry pipe tobacco. If I was unlucky, he would like me and propose to take my hand in marriage, and I’d have to accept. When, really, I see now I’d rather go back to school in London.”
Anton: “My parents insisted I participate in that marriage market. I was hoping I’d wiggle out of having to make a commitment somehow. I’d rather travel and have some adventure, though no adventure I can imagine could match the one we’re on now.” He grinned at Cat. “The Tsar wants me suitably promised to some young woman far enough away from the throne that I could never be a threat. It’s how royal families operate. But I’d rather decide for myself how to live my life. Maybe I could come visit in London sometime?”
Elena braided her hair in the way she’d always worn it in Miersk. She could feel the reality of her village origins rising to claim her. How many peasants from Miersk had ever gone to Saint Petersburg? Dr. Peter Petrovich Penkin alone, as far as she knew. Well, and Luka. But even they had never continued to the far northern shores of the vast Asian continent. Even leaving aside the congress with Russia’s magical energies, Elena knew she’d already had the adventure of a lifetime. There’d be little left to her now but sameness and worry and hunger.
So she didn’t speak, though her friends could see the weight of her limited future occurring to her. The way her shoulders dipped, her eyes lowered.
“Is there any way we can avoid the futures they have set out for us?” asked Cat, putting her hand on Elena’s knee.
“We have a job to do. Žmey-Aždaja has told us this,” said Anton. “So nothing can be the same. It can’t go on as it always has. We can’t be as we thought we would be. We must change ourselves.”
“We must change our ambitions,” said Cat, nodding, “and that will change us.”
They looked at Elena to see if she agreed with their aspirations, if she would join their cordial society.
She was too honorable to pretend.
She smiled at them out of affection, perhaps even love, but she didn’t speak. She didn’t lie. She didn’t think there was opportunity for such as her.
Her silence sobered the other two. They sat in stillness in a ring on the floor, knees nearly touching, as the house rocked slowly back and forth. Mewster’s pace was slowing down. As soon as the roads became more mud than ice, he would have to come back inside and be a kitten again.
The quiet was broken, then, by a rack of distant cries. As if to break from submission to Russian fatalism, for they were too young to embrace it fully, the three friends scrambled to the window. Baba Yaga yawned herself awake.
A great cloud of Norway geese was sweeping upon them. It was impossible to count the number, but it was in the thousands: five, eight, nine thousand geese.
They took no note of the company of travelers beneath them. The wind pulled this way and that. No one could say what forces caused the current of geese to dip and sink, to wheel away and veer back. But every time they turned a certain way in the dawn sun, the cloudless sky became a skin like fish scales, blinking. It seemed a language, a set of signals, if they only knew how to read it.
The shadow of their flight upon the ground, a word inscribed upon the earth.
“They are off somewhere, on some campaign,” said Baba Yaga, joining them. She took screws of cotton wool out of her ears and stored them in the heels of her slippers. “Surely it isn’t the time of year for their migration.”
“Are they going south for the winter? If so, they’re late,” said Anton.
“If north for the summer, they’re early,” said Cat.
“They’re going east, toward the dawn,” said the witch. “That isn’t their habit. They’ll have to learn their traditions again, if you three can manage to keep your promise to the ice-dragon, and reduce the degree of human wailing.”
“We three?” said Cat.
“I’m not human. I’ve made that clear enough. It’s none of my business if your kind survives or not.”
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