Egg & Spoon

by Gregory Maguire

  “I found the Firebird’s egg,” said Elena. “I rescued it until Mewster and Dumb Doma rescued it again. It’s still alive inside its shell. Isn’t that enough?”

  “It’s more than I did,” agreed Baba Yaga. “Still, the curse of being human is that there is always something more to do, while you are alive. Me, I’m just about immortal, so I have all the time in the world to pick up the niceties of bridge.”

  “They shouldn’t go east at this time of year, though,” said Anton. “They must behave as they should, or we shall never right the world.”

  “They are wild things,” replied the witch. “When did a wild creature ever obey an order or keep a promise? Or a child, for that matter?”

  A half an hour later, the Norway geese were nearly gone. Smoke was beginning to arise from the chimneys and hearths of Archangel. Roosters crowed.

  “We’ll skirt the town,” said Baba Yaga, and directed Mewster to take what looked like an orbital track around fields of broken stubble and halfhearted fences. They kept Archangel to one side.

  Then they came to a stone bridge across a narrow but swiftly moving stream. On either bank, bare trees leaned. Ahead, the track rose up a slope, and there was mud and runoff in the road.

  The company of matryoshkas was lagging behind the izba, shaking merrily and silently. “I’m going to have to send them downstream,” said Baba Yaga. “I don’t think they can slide across mud as easily as they can slalom over the snow.”

  The matryoshkas didn’t wait for Baba Yaga to say more. One by one they rocked down through the stands of willow and plopped into the water like so many balsa-wood ducks. They spun and eddied at first, but their soldier husbands gave them ballast. Doll by doll they caught the current and began to ride the rapids.

  Anton and Cat were waving good-bye. As Baba Yaga unhitched Mewster from the reins, she said harshly, “So many fare-thee-wells. You want to go, too? How about you, Mewster? If this is the season for good-byes, let’s get it done with all at once.”

  “You’d abandon your guests halfway? They can’t get back to Saint Petersburg on their own.” Mewster was scandalized. “And I haven’t served my sentence yet. You aren’t famous for freeing any serfs. Are you coming down with something?”

  “Furniture!” bellowed the witch. “Table, bathtub, the lot of you. It’s time to go out in the world and seek your fortunes, if that’s your hope.”

  There was a crashing sound as all the furniture went and tried to hide under the bed, and the bed tried to hide under itself.

  “The League of Freed Prisoners is taking new members for the next five minutes, then the rolls are closed,” she continued. Mewster chose this moment to take a nap. I like to imagine that at least a dish ran away with a spoon, but even the kitchen implements stayed in their places, either devoted to Baba Yaga or terrified of freedom.

  Elena came to Dumb Doma’s front steps and picked her way down them. She was carrying the Firebird’s egg. “All right, then, freedom it is. I think you’re right. This doesn’t belong to the Tsar,” she said. “It belongs to Russia. And Dumb Doma has her own hen now. She doesn’t need this.”

  No one spoke — perhaps they didn’t dare — as Elena proceeded to put the Firebird’s egg in the water.

  “Live your life,” she said. “Be born. Be light.”

  The egg followed the last of the matryoshkas, spinning softly and glowing with its own interior fuse.

  Now the Firebird’s egg was drifting around a screen of trees and rocky riverbank. Now it was lost to sight.

  A moment after it disappeared, the granite pink of early morning near Archangel became transparent with a shudder of white power. This lightning began at the earth and flared heavenward. The Firebird reborn.

  Though the skies were still clear, a snow began to fall over the North. A solid, steady, full-bodied flurry of flakes from nowhere. See that Archangel blue sky as a background, and the snowflakes turning in the frigid air. Where they landed on the ground they were white, but in the air? Snowflakes cold as cold brass, snowflakes like cold copper, and saffron, and cold gold, in all those shiny colors of a Firebird, and more colors besides, colors that have no names. Winter at last, before it was too late.

  A matryoshka army, an immortal hen, a resurrected Firebird. You will think this a string of nonsense. Perhaps you have never been far enough from home. You leave home, I have learned, counting the trip day by day. If you ever get to return, you count the trip miracle by miracle.

  But now the journey began to seem unending. Elena thought, The real world is starting to reassert itself. I have to get used to what I will find next. Perhaps a return to prison, since I’ve helped do away with both the Fabergé egg and the Firebird’s egg.

  “Why such a long face?” asked Baba Yaga.

  Elena didn’t answer. She had seen that the witch was pulling away from them. She no longer made any pretense of trying to prepare them supper, but sent them out to beg for bread. Then they had eggs on toast for supper because, of course, there was no shortage of eggs.

  For hours at a time, the witch sat at a surprisingly ladylike little escritoire, with sheets of paper and pots of ink. She ran the plume of her pen across her noble nose. She was making notes on how to be a good mother when the dragon-tooth boy came home for the summer, but she burnt the pages every evening in the flame of a taper. “I’m writing them,” she snapped when Cat asked. “I didn’t say I want anyone to read them. Myself included. I don’t pry. They’re none of my business.”

  It was hard to believe it, but the weather had grown colder. The mushy winter thaw that had characterized the day that Elena and Cat had first met — that thaw had lifted. Snow almost daily. They’d liberated the matryoshkas and their soldier husbands too soon, they realized. The bobbing dolls could have continued to zing alongside Dumb Doma.

  But Mewster was domesticated again, a pretty kitten at the saucer of milk or sleeping aloft in the airborne Firebird’s nest. He refused to pull Dumb Doma on the toboggan any longer.

  The day came when Baba Yaga snapped at the children, “We’re getting too near Saint Petersburg. When the Firebird of Russia was missing and presumed dead, I sucked it in and made my appearances. I have no need to do that again. I hate crowds. But there’s the road, there’s your life. Go find dinner, and don’t come back to give me any. I’m done with sharing. Anyway, I’m not hungry. This is toodle-loo, honeybuckets. Don’t bother to write, because I get no postal delivery where I’m going.”

  “We can’t leave just like that.” Cat was appalled. “Where can we find you if we need you again?”

  “You can’t. Listen, Little Drear, I hate saying good-byes. I have a good strategy for avoiding them.”

  “What’s that?” asked Anton.

  “I eat my guests. Better keep moving while I’m soft-hearted and have given you a chance to get away.” She flourished a hand in the direction of the four skulls, which were sitting along a baseboard all pell-mell, like discarded boots. But by now the kids saw them for what they probably were: learning aids for medical students, made out of some chalky composite and bought wholesale.

  They could see through Baba Yaga, too.

  The fiendish glee had gone. Her face looked ancient, betraying that she saw worries behind her eyes as well as in front of them. This campaign had changed her, too. Or maybe it was the stress of fretting over her son, off at his first job and no word from him yet. Elena realized she felt sorry for the old witch. Baba Yaga reminded her of Grandmother Onna, hovering near the well, uncertain if the current disaster was serious enough to take a plunge.

  They gathered their things. There wasn’t much. The witch said they could keep the fur coats and such. “Souvenirs,” said Cat in a cold voice, wanting a gesture of some sort, a ceremony, a more potent talisman than mittens.

  “You brought me a Fabergé egg, twice, and then we had to give it away twice. I’m out double,” replied the witch. “You don’t get so much as a comb from me, for that. It’s the thought that counts
.” The first migraine of parenthood deepened upon her brow.

  Anton leaped down happily enough. Adventure begins with not knowing what comes next. But Cat lingered at the door. Cat wouldn’t accept this rude dismissal; her great-aunt’s moral rectitude arose in her. “Really, all this, and you’re not even going to say good-bye? I hardly think that’s fair.”

  “If you need someone to abuse, go find your parents. They’re shirking their duty by taking themselves out of the line of fire. I have my own obligations, and I haven’t time for your nonsense.” The witch slammed the door behind them and began cursing up a storm, banging frying pans and rolling pins. Elena caught Cat’s hand and gave her a corner of her apron to wipe her face with.

  They could hear a sound from Baba Yaga that they’d never heard before. No one could bear to admit what it was. The young can never stand the tears of the elderly, and woe betide us if the elderly in question is more than a millennium old. They looked about, they avoided comment. Anton kicked at stones. Elena gripped the matryoshka for comfort. Cat just stared at the hard, hard world the way it was, the way it would always be: a disappointment. Here was Dumb Doma. Here was Mewster on a sill by the open window, perhaps also trying to escape the maelstrom of a witch’s grief. Here was the immortal hen of the tundra, having no luck pecking for grubs in the snow at the feet of Dumb Doma.

  “Why doesn’t she let you go, too?” Cat’s voice was steel, as if she was jealous of the kitten. “Are you the last one not to belong to the League of Freed Prisoners?”

  “That’s between her and me,” said Mewster. “That’s our story. It runs on a parallel track. Everything doesn’t get fixed at once, no matter how simple or sentimental you are. Go find your own story, and stop interfering in mine. Anyway, she needs someone to berate, or she’d lose her marbles. And then where would we all be, if she got crazier than she already is?”

  Saint Petersburg was promised by a sign. They turned to walk down the road in that direction. Dumb Doma followed for a few tentative steps until the witch bellowed from inside that Dumb Doma was to stay where it was or she’d come out and chop off its legs. So the izba paused, and stepped in place, as if unhappy to see its passengers walking away. But there was nothing it could do.

  A moment later Mewster called to them. He was prowling on the roof with little dainty steps. “Haven’t you forgotten something?”

  They turned. The kitten said, “Little Miss Cluck Cluck?”

  “But … but that’s Dumb Doma’s baby,” said Elena.

  “To hear you tell it, that black hen was a citizen of your village before she set out on her own adventure. Maybe she wants to go home, too. In any case, she’s a grown hen giving out more eggs than you can count. And in the grain crib, she’s left a half-dozen downy live wires who are busy stealing Baba Yaga’s patented magic oatmeal. Dumb Doma will have her family.”

  “That’s kidnapping,” said Anton. “Let’s try it.” He ran back and scooped up the hen. “I hope this is good advice.”

  “Little advice is good,” said Mewster, “but look: maybe Baba Yaga will come hunting you for revenge, and then you’ll get more of that excitement you crave. Now, you’d better hurry away before she discovers her loss.”

  Dumb Doma was distressed; they could tell by its hopping up and down, three feet in the air. The sound of crashing furniture and the shrieks of the witch followed them almost a verst. But as soon as they rounded a curve in the road and disappeared from view, the sounds stopped. Dumb Doma didn’t have much of a memory. After all, if it couldn’t keep track of where the furniture and windows were supposed to stay, it probably couldn’t tell the difference between an immortal hen and her chicks.

  Saint Petersburg was thick with human noise.

  They found their way through the maze of neighborhoods to the street where Madame Sophia lived. When they rang the bell, Monsieur d’Amboise answered the door.

  Cat: “But I thought you and Miss Bristol left.”

  “We lasted two days. We were haunted by the thought of your great-aunt grieving over your second disappearance so soon after having been reunited with you. We thought we could bear it, leave her sorrow behind us, but we couldn’t. So we came back. We persuaded her you’d return. Today you’ve proven us right.”

  Anton and Elena waited downstairs while Cat went up to visit her great-aunt. When she returned an hour later, she was much shaken. “I can see she’s relieved that I’m home,” she said, “but the toll upon her has been serious. She should travel to the south, to get some sun and rest, and I should go with her, if I’m not detained by the authorities for my part in this affair. London will have to wait.”

  Then they set out by carriage to see the Tsar. Korsikov clacked the reins, and Monsieur d’Amboise accompanied them. “We don’t need a chaperone now, after all we’ve been through,” said Anton. But the clammy ordinariness of life was back upon them, and his protests were ignored.

  From the opposite seat in the carriage, Monsieur d’Amboise studied Elena’s face. “I see you, too, have been through a great deal,” he remarked.

  “Can you see what I have been through?” she asked.

  “No one can see that,” he replied. “Evidence of life, yes, but not the life itself. That is private until it is shared.”

  She was in no mind to share, though she appreciated his observation.

  They turned onto the quay along the river, heading for the Winter Palace. The pavilions had been dismantled or had drifted out to sea. The river was now frozen over. “A sudden cold snap at last,” growled Korsikov. “Makes the digging of the emergency canals harder to handle, but the water level hasn’t risen much in the past week. So maybe the worst is over.

  “For now,” he amended, being Russian. “But worse still is yet to come.”

  Whole populations of the city were out on the ice, skating with abandon. Elena and Cat and Anton itched to join them, but the work they had to do next was more important.

  Monsieur d’Amboise and the children were invited into the palace and led to a chamber hung with silk panels. It wasn’t long before a monk came to the door. Rangy, mangy, and intense. “I am Brother Grigori Rasputin,” he said. “The Tsar’s new advisor. I replace Brother Uri, who has been — called away.”

  Monsieur d’Amboise didn’t want to release the children to his care, but the advisor to the Tsar overrode his concern. “Don’t fret. I’ll return and tell you what His Imperial Majesty has decided, when the time is right,” said the monk to the butler.

  “It’s strange to see a holy man devoted to poverty making himself at home in such surroundings,” observed Monsieur d’Amboise.

  “It’s a penance I endure for my Tsar.”

  Brother Grigori led them through room after well-appointed room. Great windows overlooked the Palace Embankment on one side, and the shine of winter sun off the frozen river danced over gilt and velvet. “You have severely troubled your distant cousin, the Tsar,” remarked the monk.

  “That’s none of your concern,” said Anton.

  “It is. Though newly elevated to my post, my concern is the well-being of our leader, about whom I care in every way I can.”

  The boy only said, “He wanted me to be engaged to someone who could never qualify as Tsarina, should accidents happen that put me in line to the throne. He wanted me out of the way, accounted for, and shunted off the stage.”

  “He wanted you out of the way,” said the monk, “for your own sake.”

  “I don’t know what that is supposed to mean.”

  Brother Grigori glanced at Anton, and then at the two girls who were walking several paces behind. “I do not betray confidences of the Tsar,” admitted the monk, weighing his words. “But I think I can say this: Not everyone who must wear the crown does so willingly. The burdens of state are just that: burdens. Even though you’re but a distant relative of the Tsar, you are his godson. Our emperor would rather see you safely removed from the obligations of ruling Russia than have you remain in danger of being b
rought forward as a reluctant Tsar. Should something happen to him and his heirs. You want a life of adventure? I understand this. I was a boy once. To be Tsar is to have all the wrong adventures, all of the worries with few of the joys. He can’t liberate his own children from the obligation to rule, but if he can protect anyone else, should something happen to his own line — well, as a godfather, he’s doing what little he can for you.”

  “I see,” said Anton. He wasn’t sure he believed what Brother Grigori was saying. There was an argument for anything.

  The monk delivered the children to a doorway, where the Deputy Sub-Lieutenant bade them wait until they were announced. The monk melted away. In a few moments, a maid came out and held the door open so they could enter.

  They met the Tsar in a room that looked like an ordinary study. An interrupted game of cards on a table with a green felt cover, improbable greenhouse blossoms dropping their summery petals on the windowsill. Several books were left facedown at the pages on which they’d been abandoned. The Tsar looked tired, but his face opened up at the sight of the children.

  “There you are!” he cried, and opened his arms. Anton did not dart to them. The Tsar embraced him anyway. “You wretched child. Why did you run away from all I was doing for you?”

  “I do not care to become engaged,” he said. “I prefer a life of uncertainty.”

  “I wanted you accounted for,” said the Tsar, “and you proved to manage precisely the opposite. Your parents are beside themselves with worry, but I’ve already sent a messenger to tell them you are returned. They’ll arrive at the palace to greet you within the hour, I’d warrant. Now, tell me where you have been and what you have done.”

  They could see his head was full of doings all over Russia, from the Bering Strait to the Baltic Sea, from the borders of Prussia to the Mongolian reaches to the Himalayan khanates. So, though they hadn’t discussed a strategy, they colluded by instinct and didn’t reveal everything to him.