Spinning Silver

by Naomi Novik

  Then I thought whether it was better for me only to be living with the Mandelstams or for all of us to be living with my father. I decided it would be better to be living with my father after all, if Sergey and Wanda were there and all right. Only we could not have been doing that, either, even if my father was not killed, because he was going to make Wanda marry Kajus’s son. Then I had to think whether it would feel better to be here with the Mandelstams or better to be somewhere else that might not be as good, but with Sergey and Wanda. It was hard to think about that because I didn’t know what the somewhere else would be like, but after I thought about it a long time, I decided slowly that still I wanted to be with Sergey and Wanda. I could not be happy with stones in my stomach.

  The nut from the white tree was in my pocket. I had kept thinking about planting it in the Mandelstams’ yard, but I still hadn’t done it. I took it out and I looked at it and then I said out loud, “Mama, I cannot plant the nut here, because Sergey and Wanda cannot come here ever again. I will not plant it until I find a place where me and Sergey and Wanda can all live together and be safe.” Then I put it away again. I was sorry not to be able to plant the nut, because I missed feeling that Mama was near, but still it felt like the right decision. Sergey and Wanda had given me the nut to plant, but Mama would want them to be able to visit.

  I got back to the house with the basket. While Panov Mandelstam was carefully writing everything down, I asked him, “Does anyone know where Sergey and Wanda are?”

  He stopped and looked up at me. “The men went out to look for them again today. They did not find anything.”

  I was glad for that, but then I thought about it and I realized it was bad, too. “But I have to find them,” I said. If no one else could, even a lot of big men, then how was I going to do it?

  Panov Mandelstam laid his hand on my head. “Maybe they will send word to you when they are somewhere safe,” he said, but he said it too kindly, the way you say nice things to a goat when you are trying to get it to come so you can tie it up. It did not mean he wanted to hurt me. He only wanted to keep me in a good safe warm place so I wouldn’t die in the snow somewhere. But if I stayed in this safe warm place, I would never be able to see Sergey and Wanda again.

  “They cannot send word,” I said. “If they did then everyone here would know where they were, and they would go and get them.”

  Panov Mandelstam did not say anything back, only looked up at Panova Mandelstam, who had stopped her spinning and was looking back at him. So I knew I was right, because if I was not right, they would have told me so.

  I said, “Sergey and Wanda were going to go to Vysnia. They wanted to ask someone for work.” I had to think about it because he was someone’s grandfather, and I didn’t know who the someone was, which was strange. But I did know the grandfather’s name. “Panov Moshel.”

  “That is my father,” Panova Mandelstam said. Then she said to Panov Mandelstam, “Basia’s wedding is on Wednesday. We could go. And . . .” She trailed off frowning in a puzzled way. “And . . .” she said again, as though she expected something to come out of her mouth, only it wasn’t coming. He was frowning at her, puzzled too. She stood up from the spinning wheel and walked around the room with her hands gripping each other, looking out into nothing, until she came to a stop in front of the shelf over the oven. She stared at a little group of carved wooden dolls standing there. “Miryem is there,” she said suddenly. “Miryem is visiting my father.”

  She said it like she was pushing against a wall to make the name come out. Panov Mandelstam stood up so quickly his pen fell to the ground, his face going pale. I was going to ask them who that was, but by the time I opened my mouth to ask, I couldn’t remember the name she had said anymore. Panova Mandelstam turned, putting her hand out. “Josef,” she said. Her voice went up and down. “Josef—how long—?” She stopped talking, and I didn’t like looking at her face. It made me think of my father on the floor making noises and then being dead.

  “I will go hire a sleigh,” Panov Mandelstam said. It was already getting late, but he was putting on his coat anyway as if he meant we would go right away. Panova Mandelstam hurried to the secret jar in the fireplace and counted out six silver coins into a bag to give to him. He took the bag and went out.

  Panova Mandelstam snatched up a sack and went into the bedroom and started packing as soon as he left. I was glad that we were going to go look for Sergey and Wanda, but I didn’t like the hurry. It felt like she was afraid something bad would happen if she stopped moving. She knelt down and started taking clothing out of the clothing box. I helped her by holding the bag open for each piece to lay inside, but then she stopped putting things inside. She was sitting on her heels staring into her box. There were some dresses in there that were too small for her, and a pair of small black leather boots. They were worn and had some patches but they were still mostly good. She touched them with her hand and it was trembling.

  “Were those yours?” I asked her. She didn’t say anything, only shook her head. She put a few more things in the bag and closed the box. I thought we were finished but she kept kneeling there with her hands on the top of the box, and then she looked at me and opened the box again. She took out the boots and gave them to me. I tried them on. They were a little big on my feet but they felt so soft. I had never had leather shoes before.

  “Put on another pair of socks,” she said, and gave me a pair out of the box, knitted and thick, also small. The boots fit so nicely afterwards. My feet were very warm even when I went outside to take care of the goats. I could walk right through the snow and not feel it.

  “Who will feed the goats and the chickens while we are away?” I asked her, when I came back in.

  “I will go and talk to Panova Gavelyte,” she said, and she put on her coat and her kerchief and took some pennies from the jar and went out. I watched from the doorway when she went to the house across the street and knocked on the door. Panova Gavelyte did not ask her inside. She folded her arms across her chest like making herself into a wall, and kept her on the doorstep talking. She did not bring the wall down until Panova Mandelstam held out the pennies, and then she took them and quickly went inside and shut the door in her face.

  Panova Mandelstam looked tired when she came back to the house, as if she had been traveling very far or working all day hard in the fields, but she didn’t say anything. She took out a basket and packed it with food for traveling. Then she stirred the coals in the oven and turned ash over them until the fire went dark and cold. When she was done, the sleigh was already pulling up to the door. Panov Mandelstam was sitting on the seat. He came out and got the basket and the sack and helped her get into the back of the sleigh. I sat next to her and he put two fur cloaks and some thick blankets over us, and then he shut the door of the house, and shut the gate after that, and he got into the sleigh on my other side.

  The driver was a skinny young man about Sergey’s age. He was wearing a coat for a big man and I think two other coats underneath it, though, so he looked big on the seat. He clucked to his big horses and the sleigh lurched forward and we started going. We went down the road through town. It was crowded. I think everyone had finished working for the day. There would not be much to do in the fields anyway because the snow had not melted yet. People watched us going by with hard angry faces. At the end of the road a few men came out of a very big house with a big chimney and a sign that had a picture of a big mug of steaming krupnik painted on it. They stopped the sleigh in the road and said to Panov Mandelstam, “Don’t think we won’t hear about it, Jew, if you help murderers escape justice.”

  “We are going to Vysnia for a wedding,” Panov Mandelstam said quietly.

  The man snorted. He looked up at our driver. “You’re Oleg’s boy, aren’t you? Algis?” he said. The driver nodded. “You stay with the Jews. Keep your eye on them. You understand?” Algis nodded again.

  I looked over at the house. Kajus was standing in the doorway with his arms cross
ed over his chest and his chin raised, as if he was proud of something. I wondered what. I stared at him. He glanced at me and scowled, but he stopped looking so proud. He turned and went inside very quickly. Algis shook his reins and the horses set off again. We were all quiet in the back of the sleigh behind him. We had been quiet before, too, but now it was not a nice kind of quiet. Even though we were in a sleigh and it was open, I felt like we were shut in with him. The trees came up all around us quickly when we left town. When I turned my head to watch them going by, they all came together into a wooden wall built around the road, keeping us out.

  *

  I already half knew what I would see when Tsop took me down to the storerooms, but there was something dreadful about seeing the doors open to the first small chamber, itself already three times the size of my grandfather’s vault, chests and sacks of silver heaped to the ceiling along each wall. Grimly I walked down the path left open between them to the second room, which was three times again the size of the first, although at least there were small paths left between the stacks, and wooden shelves to hold the treasure.

  But the doorway to the third room stood at the other end: two heavy doors made of white wood bound with silver, and when I pushed them open, on the other side I found a chamber that surely a thousand years had slowly chiseled out of the mountain; enormous, with sloping foothills of sacks and loose gleaming coin piled taller than my head. The river itself snaked through the middle of the room, a shining frozen road coming in from one dark archway and leaving through the other: as if it wound through the depths of the mountain all the way here from the grove of white trees, and went on all the way out to the mountainside waterfall. I had spent a day changing a single chest. I couldn’t imagine how much magic it would take to turn all of this into gold, and how much time. More than I had.

  Tsop was standing next to me, eyeing me sidelong. “Go bring me something to eat and drink,” I said grimly, and then I went back out to the first room.

  I’d had a long day already, and what I wanted was my bed. Instead I emptied sacks and filled my hands with silver coins, and poured them back in, gold. I did try to thrust my hands into a bag and change it all at once, but it didn’t work properly: the coins changed unevenly, and when I poured it out, there were a dozen of them still silver. I wasn’t going to change every coin in the place and then have the king slit my throat for one that had rolled away into a corner. I was perfectly certain that if I did by some mistake leave one unchanged, he’d find it. It went quicker to do them carefully than to have to check carefully afterwards. Which isn’t to say it went quickly at all. I had only done a few sacks when Tsop came back with a tray of food and drink.

  When I finished gulping down a few mouthfuls, I looked at the napkin on the tray and spread it out over the ground. I took the next sack and poured half of it out onto the napkin, the silver spread one layer thick, so I could see which ones had changed. After a few tries, I found a way to change them just by brushing my hand over them—not too quickly, or the change didn’t go all the way through, but if I moved at a steady even pace, keeping my will on them, they all went.

  “Bring me a large dark tablecloth, the biggest you can find,” I told Tsop, and when she brought it, I started dumping out the sacks and chests onto it. I could fit two or three at once on the cloth, and when I finished with one batch, I pulled the cloth from beneath, spilling the golden pieces off, and spread the cloth again on top of them.

  It became boring, which seems ridiculous to say. I was pouring out magic by the bucketful, turning silver into shining gold with my very fingers, but it quickly stopped being magical. I would have liked to turn some of it into birds, or just set it on fire. It stopped even being a fortune, the way you could say a word too many times in a row and turn it into nonsense. I was tired and stiff and my feet and fingers ached, but I kept working. I sat on gold and slipped on gold underfoot as I took more silver from the shelves and left empty ghosts of sacks and upturned chests in a growing heap in the corner. Time slipped away unmarked, until I dumped out the final chest in that first room, and I changed the very last pieces of silver in it. I went staggering to all the shelves in the room, looking for anything left to change, and when I didn’t find anything after going round three times, I just stood there stupidly for a few more moments, and then I lay down on my mountain of gold like an improbable dragon and fell asleep without meaning to do so.

  I woke with a jerk and looked up to find the Staryk lord standing over me, surveying the hoard I’d made him; he had cupped a handful of the coins and was staring at the warm gleam of it with bright avaricious hunger in his face. I struggled up to my feet in alarm, stumbling on the shifting gold. He didn’t have any trouble keeping his footing. He even put out his hand to catch my arm and steady me, although the gesture was less a kindness than to keep me from thrashing around next to him. “What time is it?” I blurted.

  He ignored me instead of answering my question, which meant at least it wasn’t evening; I hadn’t lost an entire day. I didn’t feel like I’d slept long, either: my eyes were still gritty and tired. I drew a deep breath. He had gone away to make a survey of the room, glancing into emptied chests and sacks, still holding that shining handful. “Well?” I challenged him. “If I missed any, say so now.”

  “No,” he said, letting the coins run out of his hand to go clinking and jingling among the rest on the floor. “You have changed every coin in this first storeroom. Two storerooms yet remain.” He sounded almost polite about it, and he actually inclined his head to me, which surprised me enough that I only stared after him until he had gone out again. Then with a jerk I scrambled and slid down the golden heap to the door, and ran back upstairs to my own chambers.

  But there on my bed I found the mirror he’d made me with sunrise climbing pink and gold inside it. I sat down on the bed with a hopeless thump and stared at it in my hand. I’d spent one whole night or nearly all of it just on the smallest chamber. I could hope to finish the second one, if I didn’t sleep again, but I’d barely be able to change a single coin in the third before my time ran out.

  I thought of running away. I could get as far as the hut in the woods, maybe, but what good would that do me? I couldn’t get out of his kingdom. But I didn’t go back downstairs, either. Instead I rang the bell, and told Tsop and Flek to bring me breakfast, and I didn’t hurry over it. I sat resentfully eating platters full of fish and cold fruit as if I didn’t have a care in the world, much less an enormous silver sword hanging over my head. My husband’s politeness had made me even more certain that it was going to mean my death if I didn’t succeed, and Tsop and Flek even traded glances when they thought I wasn’t looking, as if they were wondering what I was doing. But why even try, if all I could do was leave a larger pile of gold behind for him to cut my head off over? Their law didn’t seem to allow for mistakes, and if you couldn’t make what you said true, they’d repair the fault in the world by putting you out of it.

  I had been about to tip back another glass of wine—why not be drunk until the end, for that matter—but then I stopped abruptly and put it down again. I stood up and told Tsop and Flek, “Come down to the storerooms with me. And send for Shofer to meet us there. Tell him to get the biggest sledge in the stables, and I want him to bring it there.”

  Tsop stared at me. “Into the storeroom?”

  “Yes,” I said. “The river’s frozen now, after all. So tell him to just drive the whole way down from the grove until he gets there.”

  The deer looked fairly dubious coming out of the tunnel and picking their way delicately between the vast hills of silver: he’d had to come and lead them by their heads. Flek and Tsop and Shofer looked even more dubious than that when I told them what I wanted them to do. I carefully didn’t ask them to do it, just told them. “But . . . where do you want us to take it?” Tsop said after a moment.

  I pointed to the dark mouth of the river tunnel on the other side of the chamber. “Drive the sledge into there and du
mp it out. Make sure you leave enough room for all of it.”

  “Just—leave it?” Flek said. “In the tunnel?”

  “Is anyone going to steal it from there?” I asked coolly. They all flinched, and then hurriedly avoided even looking at me, in case I should read an answer in their faces. I didn’t actually care if it was safe. What I cared about was: I had promised to change every piece of silver within these three storerooms. So there had to be a lot less of it in here, very quickly. And if my husband didn’t like the new location of his money, he could move it back after I was done.

  After a moment, Shofer silently took three sacks in each hand and tossed them into the sledge. The deer twitched their ears backwards at the thumps. After another moment, Flek and Tsop started helping him.

  Once I saw they were really doing it, I turned and went back out into the second room and set to work with my dark cloth again. It was even more tedious than yesterday: I was sore and aching in every limb, and I wasn’t quite as exhausted, so it was more boring as well as more painful. But I kept dumping out one sack after another and changing them silver to gold, silver to gold, and shoving the golden pieces away into the empty aisles while I worked. I didn’t stop to eat or drink again; I’d hung the mirror on its chain around my neck, and the sun was brightening in it with now-alarming speed. There were six enormous racks holding countless chests of silver, and I hadn’t even finished one halfway before the golden brilliance of noon began to fade again. I’d just started the second rack when the first gleam of sunset began to glow orange out of the edge of the glass. The first of my three days was gone.

  My husband appeared a few moments later, on his murderous clockwork schedule. He picked up a handful of golden pieces from the messy heap in the doorway and let them run out of his fingers as he looked around at my progress; he compressed his lips and shook his head, as if he was annoyed to see how much was left to do. “At what hour is the wedding?” he demanded of me.