The Republic of Birds

by Jessica Miller

  But even when Basha’s enchantments fade and my speed slows, I don’t lose momentum. I feel, for the first time since I left the Imperial Centre for Avian Observation, that I am going in the right direction. But all this forward movement can’t stop the small, needling pang of regret I feel: if things had been different, I might have stayed at Bleak Steppe. I might have stayed in a place where I felt like I belonged. I might have learned to move through the map with the kind of ease and grace Mira has when she dances.

  But I hurry on. There is no place to look but ahead. I go faster. The gentle blur of rain fills my ears and, as my steps become automatic, my thoughts turn to Mira, to her dancing in the cage. Her eyes were harder than I remember them, her lips pinched and troubled, her arms and legs scrawny. The only time I had seen Mira look sad like that was when I snapped at her, before the Spring Blossom Ball. When I told her to disappear.

  I walk through the night, thinking only of Mira.

  Dawn breaks, and the sky grows lighter. But the trees become darker and closer together as I go deeper into the forest.

  The trees here are scarred and some are dead and blackened. I am back in the Dead Wood.

  I walk until my legs are aching and my eyes are gritty with tiredness. Then I rest, sitting against a mossy stump. The ground is cold and hard and the moss at my back is damp, but I close my eyes and in a moment I am asleep.

  When I wake, I unpeel myself from the stump, brush away the dirt that has settled on my face, and loosen my neck. Then, I take the map from my coat pocket and open it across the forest floor. I know that if I push too hard and too far I might lose the little magic I have altogether but my hand hovers over the Republic. If I were a little more skilled, a little more powerful, then I could be there right now.

  But I’m not.

  I turn my hand into a fist and pull it away from the map. I need to find the River Dezhdy, in the Dead Wood, and follow it upstream into the High Stikhlo Mountains and beyond, to the Republic. I relace my boots, tuck the map inside Varvara’s memory bag and pull it tightly shut. I am ready to go northwards.

  There’s only one problem, I realise, looking up through the trees into the clouded sky. I don’t know where northwards is. And I can’t navigate by the sun, when it’s behind a thick bank of cloud. It’s all very well for Golovnin to steer his course across the Golden Plain with the rays of the sun, I think, but what did he do when there was no sun to be seen? Did he just sit and wait for it to burst out from behind the clouds again? I lean my head back against the stump and its damp, slimy cushion of moss.

  And then I leap up.

  Moss! Golovnin navigated by the sun, but when Kovalsky traversed the forested valleys of Lodzk there was hardly any sun to be had. I plunge my hand inside Varvara’s bag and ignore the tug of memories inside—a scrap of music, the smell of strawberries—until I find Great Names in Tsarish Cartography. I flip through the pages until I reach Chapter Three: ‘Kovalsky Traverses the Lodzk Valleys’.

  Kovalsky was well-versed in the habits of mosses and lichens and he knew that they tended to grow on the Northern side of rocks and trees. Taking a quick survey of the moss-covered trunks around him, he was soon able to find his way out of Dread Gorge and to rejoin the expedition as it made for its final destination.

  Perfect. I snapped the book shut and went from tree to tree, narrating in my head: Taking a quick survey of the moss-covered trunks around her, Olga Oblomova was soon able to determine North, and to find her way through the Dead Forest to the River Dezhdy and on to the High Stikhlo Mountains and the Republic beyond…

  And, just as if I were a cartographer in Great Names in Tsarish Cartography, it works: I follow the moss through the forest until I hear, at a distance, the rushing sound of a river. The Dezhdy. For a while I just stand there, letting the silky swish of the water fill my ears, until another sound intrudes. It is a deep loud gurgle and it emanates from the pit of my stomach. I don’t need to check the angle of the sun in the sky, or the position of the moss on the tree stumps to know that I haven’t eaten since last night’s dinner.

  I reach into the memory bag for the pickled mushrooms I packed with me. Just looking at them turns my stomach and I think longingly of Bleak Steppe and its delicious food that rained down from the ceiling. I eat the mushrooms as I walk. If I don’t stop to eat pickled mushrooms, perhaps I won’t also stop to think about the fact that I’m eating pickled mushrooms. My plan works surprisingly well, until my fingers find the jar empty. I check the bag for the silver apple Baba Mijska gave me, but all I find is a handful of silvery dust, and I realise I have nothing else to eat. Kovalsky might have been separated from his expedition, I think bitterly, but he would never have been stupid enough to set out without ample rations. Golovnin, Londonov, Pavlev: none of the Great Cartographers would have set out on a days-long journey with nothing more than a couple of jars of pickled mushrooms. Golovnin took three cases of canned soup with him across the Golden Plain. Pavlev never went anywhere without a month’s supply of good rye bread and honey. I stomp my way through the trees to the river, listing in my head all the supplies Karelin took on his journey up the Dezhdy as a kind of punishment for my own failing. Pickled herrings and jars of apple preserve and a whole crate of salted beef which went overboard when the barge collided with an ice floe.

  A whole crate of salted beef which went overboard leaving him with no more rations! He had to survive weeks on fish from the Dezhdy and forest berries. I fumble for the book. Chapter Sixteen: ‘Journey to the Dezhdy’s Source’:

  Karelin would have starved, had he not eaten the cloudberries that grew close to the banks of the Dezhdy and the trout that lived in the river, which he speared with his dagger, a gift from Tsarina Pyotrovna herself.

  I weigh up my options. I don’t have a dagger, much less one gifted to me by a Tsarina. I don’t even have the arrow Fedor gave me. If only I hadn’t broken it against the door of the yaga’s hut. There are, under the frost that coats everything here, bright bunches of berries: some orange, some pinkish-red. But unlike Karelin, I don’t know a cloudberry by sight. I pluck a pinkish-red berry and squash it. Its juice comes out a vivid purple that stains my gloves. I can’t risk poisoning myself—even though there are so many other ways I could meet a terrible end before I make it into the Republic: like falling down a mountainside, or losing all my limbs to frostbite, or getting pecked to pieces by birds. I brush the squashed remains of the maybe-cloudberry from my gloves and keep going towards the river. I stop twice along the way: once to pocket a promisingly sharp-looking rock, and once to pick up a long stick.

  The river sounds closer in my ears.

  I see a flash of icy-grey water through the trees.

  I will catch a trout for lunch.

  I narrate my movements to myself: Oblomova found it difficult to sharpen the stick, even though she had found a nicely sharp-looking rock for that exact purpose. With her gloves on, the rock proved too hard to grip, but with her gloves removed and her hands exposed to the cold, her fingers so quickly lost all feeling that she might as well have been trying to sharpen the stick with a pat of butter. Nevertheless, having sustained only four scrapes to her knuckles and one bloodied thumbnail and having only cursed the name Karelin seven and a half times, she deemed the point of her stick sufficiently…pointy.

  Somehow, narrating the story as if it’s happening to someone else, makes it seem more like an adventure. I wonder if the cartographers in Great Names in Tsarish Cartography thought their glorious adventures were so glorious at the time they were having them, or if they only became glorious once they were recorded in a book.

  When my stick is sharp enough, and the cuts on my hand have stopped bleeding, I pick my way down to the riverbank, lie flat on my belly, and continue the tale of Olga Oblomova.

  With great patience, Oblomova lay by the banks of the Dezhdy and searched its waters for a flash of pink trout beneath the grey sludge of the melting ice. She did not have to wait long to see a fish, although, after
her first efforts to spear it, she concluded she might have to wait quite a long time before she successfully captured one. It was not until approximately half an hour and two dozen fish had passed that she speared one through its soft belly—

  Wait! She speared one through its soft belly!

  I scramble upright and hold my stick aloft. The speckled pink fish flops back and forth in the air for a moment before it is still. I’ve done it! Just like Karelin!

  I turn to the task of a fire and this time it’s Pavlev to the rescue. Pavlev devotes a large passage in his first chapter to the best method for starting a fire from flint. I always used to skip over Pavlev’s chapters, as they are quite boring compared with, say, Londonov’s, but now I am very glad of his dull description of how to start a fire, including the exact angle at which the flint rock should be struck. Soon I have a feeble flame. I feed it with twigs until it burns a little steadier, and then I hold the trout over it, turning it this way and that until my arm is aching but the fish skin is bubbling and blackened.

  I break the steaming pink flesh apart and shovel it into my mouth. It is spiked with tiny sharp bones, but I think it might be the most delicious thing I have ever eaten. It gives me a warm, full feeling and the strength to follow the river eastwards to the mountains.

  I set out again, and before long I start to understand why Pavlev’s chapter is so dull. There’s a tedium to this sort of journey: moving one foot after the other, stopping to spear a trout, stopping again to sleep, then starting all over again.

  On the second day I see a smudge on the horizon that I take to be the High Stikhlos. The smudge grows ever more mountain-range-shaped as I walk towards it, but I’m never quite as close as I think I am. Each morning I set off convinced that today will be the day I reach the mountains, and each night I fall asleep, heels bubbling with blisters, telling myself that tomorrow will be the day. By the fourth day, I wonder Pavlev ever found anything to write about at all.

  At the fourth day’s end, I collapse on the grass by the Dezhdy’s banks. The ground is freezing cold but I am too tired to care. I find the map in Varvara’s memory bag and unroll it. I know I can’t travel through it. Even trying is too risky. But I just need to see Mira.

  I rest my finger on Ptashkagrad. Almost immediately I see her golden cage suspended over the rooftops. Birds are clustered thickly around it. There is something sinister in the expectant way they crowd the cage. At last, some of them fly away and I see Mira. She is dancing, but she looks like a broken puppet. I can’t stand to watch anymore. I fold the map.

  The next day, the image of Mira keeps me going, with my eyes trained on my feet and not the so-close-yet-still-so-far mountains. At the end of the day, I look up. And, abruptly, they are there.

  Not there in the distance.

  Not there on the horizon.

  There. Looming right over me, taller and steeper than I could ever have imagined. The High Stikhlos, the only thing between me and the Republic.

  I lie down in their shadow for the night, in a makeshift shelter dug into the side of the riverbank (another of Karelin’s ideas) but sleep only comes in fits and starts. I can practically feel the mountains above me.

  With the first rays of daylight, I open Great Names in Tsarish Cartography at Chapter Nineteen: ‘Londonov Summits Mount Zenith’.

  It’s useless.

  I can see Mount Zenith, Tsaretsvo’s highest peak. It looks like a broken tooth. But Chapter Nineteen, with its talk of crampons and rappelling, holds very little practical use for me. I need to cross the mountain range, not plant a flag on Tsaretsvo’s highest peak. But the chapter has a footnote: Londonov took three men with him to the summit, two of whom would return, while the rest of the expedition crossed the Nizkiy Pass into the Northern Plains, where they waited for Londonov to complete his descent from Mount Zenith.

  The Nizkiy Pass. You don’t read Great Names in Tsarish Cartography as many times as I have without learning that a mountain pass is a route through a ‘col’: the lowest point between two peaks, the seam where two mountains are stitched together. I am not interested in peaks and heights and summits. I am interested in low, traversable seams. I need to find a path that will take me from one side of the High Stikhlos to the other with a minimum of glory and a minimum of fuss.

  I squint up at Mount Zenith, then let my gaze travel down to the place where its rocky shoulder butts against its neighbour’s. It is steep. Icy. I can still see more than a hundred ways I might fall from it to a certain death. But I also see that wrinkling through the rock, so narrow it’s almost indiscernible, is a path.

  I gather my things.

  Olga Oblomova set out fearlessly to scale the High Stikhlos’ lowest point: the Nizkiy Pass.

  I scramble on all fours up the slippery path, wondering how the lowest point of the mountain range could still be so incredibly high. I climb until the sun is high. Any time I try to straighten up to see ahead, the wind sends me back clinging to the rocky mountainside.

  I climb higher. The slope becomes icier and the wind even more fierce. Twice, my feet slide out from under me. Twice, I have to claw my numb fingers into the frozen, rocky earth to stop myself from falling. But, somehow, I make it to the top. My heart is pounding with terror and with the thrill of having made it.

  On the other side of the slope is the Republic of Birds. I crawl forward, for my first glimpse of the Republic and I feel like all the air is suddenly squeezed out of my lungs. I am looking over a sheer drop.

  Tears prick my eyes. I’ve come so far. I’m so close. But from here it’s all but impossible to get into the Republic.

  Unless—

  There’s a small crevice in the cliff face. It’s narrow and crusted with ice. But—I follow it with my eyes—it goes down to where the rock face smooths out into something a bit less steep.

  If I could just swing my foot into the crevice—

  If I could just inch my way along until I’m in its narrow gap—

  If I could just reach down to the next foothold—

  If I could just climb down and plant my foot firmly on the soil of the Republic—

  It’s a lot of ifs. I lie a while, flat on my belly, considering my plan and I wonder how this story might be told in Great Names in Tsarish Cartography.

  Knowing the treacherous cliff face was her only route into the Republic, Olga Oblomova gathered her courage and climbed with calm confidence down the narrow, ice-crusted crevice.

  If Olga Oblomova the Great Cartographer can do it, I think, so can I. I stand up and turn around. I grip the rock and lower my body, slower than slow, until it hangs over the precipice. I swing my foot and I find the thin crevice and I place my boot in it as firmly as I can. I loosen my grip on the ridge above and slide my hands down to steady myself against the frozen rockface. Then, my other foot finds a place on the ice and I edge along, my face pressed against the rock, fingers cramped and sweating with effort, feet searching carefully for the next foothold. Until my boot connects with a slick of ice and skids out from under me.

  I lose my grip, and I swing my foot frantically but when I bring it down where the rock should be, it plunges into nothing.

  And I am plunging into nothing, too.

  fter the War in the Skies was won, after the feasting and celebrations and the victory parades through the streets of Stolitsa, Tsarina Pyotrovna’s thoughts turned to the firebird’s egg once more. She had led her army to a glorious victory, conceding only the barren lands at Tsaretsvo’s north to her enemies. The skies above the Tsardom were free of birds; its cities, streets and forests were rid of yagas. And yet, through the deception of her Imperial Coven, the Tsarina had lost the firebird’s egg. She tried to push all thoughts of the egg from her mind but, as she writes in a letter to her military advisor General Stolichnin, ‘I can’t help but feel that the Tsardom would be yet more powerful if it counted a firebird in its army—our might and strength would be without equal.’

  She called the greatest cartographers in the
land and proposed an expedition to retrieve the egg from the Unmappable Blank. But, even the boldest and bravest among them could not be persuaded to go. They all remembered what had happened to Londonov, greatest cartographer of his age, when he journeyed into the Blank’s icy heart…

  Excerpted from Glorious Victory: An Impartial Account of the War in the Skies by I. P. Pavlova. Chapter Twenty-three: The Aftermath.

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  Ptashka’s Bargain

  I AM FALLING, SPLITTING the air in two, my skin stretching across my bones and my lips pulling back from my gums. Time stretches out around me. I see the slope falling away beside me and the ground coming up to meet me and, even though I know it is all happening in the space of seconds, I feel like I have been falling for hours.

  All I can think about is the head-splitting, bone-cracking crunch my body is about to make when it slams into the earth. But as I hurtle toward the ground, I hear a familiar noise. A taut thrumming sound tearing through the sky.

  Birds.

  I can’t see them. But I can sense them, just above me. Hundreds of them.

  And then I feel the sharp grasp of claws through my coat as I am lifted up inside a dense, feathered, wing-beating cloud. I am surrounded by birds and I am—almost—flying.

  The ground falls further and further away. A startled laugh escapes me. I am surprised at this new weightless, floating sensation. I have never felt so light or so free.

  But soon enough, I am hit by the realisation that I have been captured. I don’t know where the birds are taking me, or what they want with me. They fly swiftly and with purpose away from the mountains and into the Republic.