by Naomi Novik
“Me,” I said, and offered it back to him, but he wouldn’t take it. He was watching me, and the sun going down was red in his eyes, and as it lowered, he leaned in and said to me in a voice of smoke, “Yes, Irina;you they see, sweet and cold as ice,” caressing and horrible. “Will you keep your promise? Bring me the winter king, and I will make you a summer queen.”
My hands closed, crumpling the paper, and I steadied my voice before I spoke. “I will take you to the Staryk king, and put him in your power,” I said. “And you will swear to leave me be, after, and all those I love as well.”
“Yes, yes, yes,” the demon said, sounding almost impatient. “You will have beauty and power and wealth, all three; a golden crown and a castle high; I will give you all you desire, only bring him soon to me . . .”
“I don’t want your promises or gifts, and I have a crown and a castle already,” I said. “I’ll bring him to you to break the winter, for Lithvas, but my desires I’ll manage on my own once you’ve left me and mine alone.”
He didn’t like it. That glimpse from the notebook, the shadow of horror, looked out of Mirnatius’s face at me scowling, and I had a struggle not to flinch back. “But what will you have, what will I give you in return,” he said, complainingly. “Will you take youth forever, or a flame of magic in your hand? The power to cloud the minds of men and bend them to your will?”
“No, and no, and no again,” I said. “I’ll take nothing. Do you refuse?”
He made a spiteful hissing noise and curled himself up unnaturally in the seat of the sleigh, drawing Mirnatius’s legs up and wrapping his arms over them, his head swaying back and forth, like a fire clinging around a log. He muttered, “But she will bring him . . . she will bring him to me . . .” and he glared at me again, red-eyed, and hissed, “Agreed! Agreed! But if you bring him not, a feast still I will have, of you and all your loves.”
“Threaten me again, and I’ll go and take them all to live with me in the Staryk lands,” I said, a show of purest bravado, “and you can hunger alone in a winter without an end, until your food vanishes and your fire dwindles to embers and ash. Tomorrow night you will have your Staryk king. Now leave until then. I care for your company even less than his, and that’s saying a great deal.”
It hissed at me, but I’d struck on some threat it didn’t care for, or else it didn’t like my company, either; it shrank back into Mirnatius like a spark dying out, the red gleam gone, and he sank back gasping against the cushions with his eyes shut until he caught his breath. When he had it again, he turned his head to stare at me. “You refused him,” he said to me, almost angrily.
“I’m not a fool, to take gifts from monsters,” I said. “Where do you think its power comes from? Nothing like that comes without a price.”
He laughed, a little shrill and sharp. “Yes, the trick is to have someone else pay it for you,” he said, and shouted ahead to the driver, “Koshik! Find us a house to stop for the night!” and sank back again with his hand over his face.
He hadn’t thought the situation through well enough when rushing us back onto the road, and neither had I, while I was making my grandiose speeches to his demon. The only shelter to be found was a modest boyar’s house, nothing so grand as if we’d stayed with Prince Gabrielius. Naturally the boyar gave up his own bedroom to the tsar and tsarina, and a well-curtained bed in it, but everyone else was crammed in only with difficulty. It was bitterly cold again, enough that all the horses and livestock had to be gotten under cover; no one could sleep outside at all, and there was little enough room in the stables. It meant a few servants had to sleep on the floor in our room, so I couldn’t take flight, and though the demon wasn’t there, my husband still was.
My wedding night had been so long a thing of hideous and unnatural dread that I’d forgotten to be alarmed by the ordinary horror of having to lie down with a stranger. I told myself with relief that at least he didn’t want me, no matter how unpleasant it would be even just to lie in a bed together. When the servants began to undress him, and he noticed I was still there, he also looked over at the bed in a kind of blank resignation. And then, after the candles were put out and we were lying stiffly beside each other with the bedcurtains drawn around us, the winter chill still creeping in around them despite the wooden walls and the fire in the grate, he heaved out an angry breath and turned over towards me, with his mouth tight as a prisoner going to the block.
I stopped him with my hands on his chest, staring at him in the dim rose light with my heart thundering suddenly fast. “Well, my beloved wife?” he said bitterly, and too loud, a mockery of tenderness performed for our audience, and I realized he meant to have me after all. I couldn’t think; I was as blank as a page. There were four servants outside listening: if I said no, if I said not yet, if they heard me—and then his hand bunched my gown and drew the thin fine linen of it up over my thighs, and his fingers trailed over my skin.
It made me jump, an involuntary shiver, and my cheeks went painfully red and hot. Then I said too loudly, “Oh, beloved,” and put my hands on his chest and shoved him back from me, as hard as I could.
He wasn’t expecting it, and he was only propped up in the bed on his arms, so he fell over; he pushed himself up with a half-outraged expression, for all he’d been doing it as a man condemned, and I leaned in and whispered fiercely, “Bounce the bed!”
He stared at me. I moved on the bed myself, enough to make the old wood groan audibly, to demonstrate, and with a half-bewildered look he joined me, until I gave another small cry for the benefit of our audience, and he abruptly seized a pillow and thrust his face into it and began shaking with a laughter so violent I thought for a moment he’d been possessed again into a fit.
And then suddenly he was weeping instead, so stifled I didn’t hear a sound even there behind the curtains with him; only when he had to break away just long enough to snatch one breath between agonies. If they had heard him out in the room, there would have been nothing to make them doubt our theater; he only made the small gasps, all other sound silenced.
I sat there wooden as a doll; I didn’t know what to do. I didn’t want to feel anything, and at first I only resented it, that he had the bad taste to weep in front of me as if he had the right to expect me to care, but I’d never heard anyone weep so. I had been afraid, and I had been hurt, and I had sorrowed, but I didn’t have cries like that inside me. He would have filled me with them, if he’d fed me to his demon. As he was being devoured himself, perhaps.
His own fault, I would have said, and I did say to myself, fiercely, over and over, as I sat there with his body softening beside me like melting snow as he sank into the limp quietness of exhaustion. But I still felt sorry for him, even though I didn’t want to, as if he was conjuring sympathy out of me. I sat with my knees drawn up under my shift and my arms wrapped around them tight, trying to hold it in, until I thought maybe he was asleep. I risked a look over his shoulder: his eyes were open and dull, but the bloodshot red was fading out of them already, and he closed them and turned his face a little farther into the pillow.
CHAPTER 18
I was afraid that Stepon and Miryem’s mother would have a hard time walking, after we left the house, with all the snow. But the snow had frozen hard, and we stayed on top of it. Only Sergey fell through, twice, and we beat the snow off his clothes so it didn’t melt and make him cold. And it was not for a long time. We were walking for only half an hour maybe, even with him falling through the snow, when suddenly Sergey said, “I think I see the road,” and he was right. We came out of the trees and there was the river, frozen hard, and the road next to it, with sleigh tracks already in the snow.
There were houses and villages on the road all the rest of the day while we were walking. They came very close together because we were getting nearer to Vysnia, Miryem’s mother said. I didn’t understand how we could have been so close to so many houses. We had been so far from the road, so deep into the forest, when we found the little house
. It was strange that we had not heard any sounds of people, and that Sergey had never seen anyone while he was going out for wood. But the houses and villages were there. I was a little afraid when we saw people, but nobody paid any attention to us. When it was getting dark, Miryem’s father told us to wait on the road, and he went ahead to the next house up ahead, a farmhouse. He came back with a basket of food, and said he had given them money to let us sleep in their barn above the animals that night. In the morning we went the rest of the way to Vysnia, and it was only a few hours walking.
I thought Vysnia would be like town only bigger, but really it was like a building. All we could see of it was a wall that went as far as you could see in either direction. It was made out of red bricks built one on top of another so high that you could not see over it, and then higher than that, too. There were no windows in the wall except little very narrow windows up at the very top, that looked so small that you would have to put the side of your face up to them and peer through with one eye. The only way through was a door at the end of the road, so big that a big sledge pulled with four horses and loaded all the way with wool could go right through it.
There was no other way to get close to the wall. A big ditch had been dug all around the bottom of the wall. It was full of snow, but we could tell it was there because the snow was lower there, and there were sharp points poking out of it: big trees that had been stripped of branches with their ends made sharp. It looked like they did not want anyone to come in, ever.
But there were many, many people waiting at the city door to come in. I had never seen so many people. They stretched out along the road like chickens walking in a line. When we got close enough to see that wall and the line of people, I drew close to Sergey, and Stepon slipped his hand into mine and tugged on it. He wouldn’t say anything until I put my head down close so he could whisper right into my ear, “Couldn’t we go back to the house?”
But Miryem’s parents did not seem to be worried. “It will be a long wait today,” Miryem’s mother said. “Someone important must be coming to see the duke. See, they are keeping the gate clear until they arrive.”
“The tsar’s coming, I heard,” a woman ahead of us in line said, turning around. She was wearing a good wool dress, brown, embroidered at the hem, with a red shawl over her head and a basket on her arm; her son was a tall silent young man with curls behind his ears like Panov Mandelstam wore, so they were Jews also.
“The tsar!” Miryem’s mother said.
The other woman nodded. “He married the duke’s daughter, last week. And back for a visit already! I hope it’s not a bad sign.”
“The poor girl must be homesick,” Miryem’s mother said. “How old is she?”
“Oh, she’s old enough to be married,” the woman said. “My sister pointed her out to me in the city last year, walking with her servants. Not much to look at, I would have said, but they say the tsar fell in love with her at first sight.”
“Well, the heart knows what it wants,” Panova Mandelstam said.
I had never heard her talk with anyone like that. I thought they must know each other, but after a while, Miryem’s mother asked, “Do you have family in the city?” and the woman said, “My sister lives there, with her husband. We have a farm in Hamsk. Where are you from?”
“From Pavys,” Miryem’s mother said. “A day’s journey. We’ve come for a wedding: my niece, Basia.”
The woman uttered a glad cry and took her by the shoulders. “My nephew Isaac!” she said. They kissed each other on the cheeks, and embraced, and then were talking of names of people I didn’t know: they were friends, as easily as that. I did not understand how they had found each other standing in that long line of all those many people. It seemed like magic.
We were waiting for a long time. I would have thought it would be easier to stand than to walk, but it wasn’t. The woman had food in her basket, and she insisted that we eat some of it, and I still had some in mine also, and we shared it all out. We brushed snow off some stumps and bigger stones along the side of the road so we could sit for a little while at least.
While we were eating a drumming began to come through the ground under us, and then a jingling sound faintly off. Men came out of the city gate and walked down the line pushing everyone even more back off the road, and when they came to us they told us in sharp voices to get up and be ready to bow. They had swords on their belts, real swords, not toys. We were still standing for a long time again waiting as the jingling got louder little by little, and then it was very suddenly there next to us. I saw black horses with gold and red, and a long low sleigh carved with big swoops and shining with gold, and a girl with a silver crown sitting in it. They went so fast that they were there just for a moment and they were gone. That big sleigh went through the door and inside the big building of the city and disappeared without even slowing down. “The tsarina, the tsarina!” I heard some people shout, but we forgot to bow, until they were gone, and then we bowed too late, but it was all right because there were still people to bow to: sledges full of bags and boxes and people, enough people to make a village of their own, all following after the tsar, like he was not really one person but all of them together, something made out of people.
After at last they were all gone, the whole tsar inside the city, the men started letting us through. All that time we had been waiting just so the tsar could get into the city without having to wait. The line was even longer behind us than in front of us. But once they began letting us come in, it only took maybe half an hour before we reached the door, even though they had kept us there for hours already. I was so tired of waiting; I only wanted to get to the door, but Stepon walked very slowly, so slowly that the people behind us began to crowd on our heels, impatient. He was looking at the door.
“What if we can’t get out again?” he said to me.
I didn’t know the answer. Then we got closer and I saw that people were not just walking through the door. The men with the swords were asking them questions and writing things down. I suddenly felt afraid. What if they asked us who we were and where we were from and why we were there? I didn’t know what I would say.
But Panova Mandelstam reached out and took my other hand that Stepon wasn’t holding and squeezed it and said softly, “Just don’t say anything,” and when we came up to the door, Panov Mandelstam spoke to a man with a sword, and then I saw him give that man a silver coin, and the man said, “All right, all right,” waving us on through.
I was so glad and easy with relief that I just kept going without thinking about it, and then I was inside the city. The wall was so big that it took twenty steps from the start of the door to the end of the door. A noise got bigger and bigger the whole way we went. Then we got to the other side and the sky was open over us, and all around us there were other buildings, like the city had swallowed them up into its belly along with us and all the other people.
Stepon stopped and put his hands over his ears and didn’t want to go anywhere. He was trembling when I touched him. Panova Mandelstam said, “Come, it will be more quiet when we get out of the busy streets,” but he couldn’t move, so finally Sergey said, “Come on, Stepon, I’ll carry you on my back,” even though he hadn’t done that for a long time, not since Stepon was very little, and Stepon was big enough now that his legs with the boots that Panova Mandelstam gave him dangled down Sergey’s sides and hung long and kicking while Sergey walked. But he put his face down against Sergey’s back and did not look up the whole time.
It was not easy to walk. The streets had been full of snow for some time, and so that people could walk, they had pushed the snow out of the middle, into two big walls on either side of the street, with holes dug out going to the doors of each house. But the streets were not very big, and then it had snowed again just yesterday, and now the walls were bigger than our heads, and there was some snow in the road that there was no room for on the walls and it was black with dirt and half frozen and slippery under our feet. There
were big houses everywhere, all pushed up against each other with no room on either side, going up so high that I felt they were leaning over, looking down at us in the street beneath them. There were people everywhere you looked. There was nowhere that didn’t have anyone in it.
We followed Panova Mandelstam. She knew where she was going. I didn’t know how. Every corner she turned looked just like the other corners. But she walked very steady and sure as though she did not have to think about which way to turn, and she was right, because we finally came to another big wall, not so big as the first one, with a door in it, and two more men with swords. Panov Mandelstam gave them a coin, too, and they let us through the door. I thought maybe now we would be leaving, but there was more city on the other side of that wall, too. Only in this part, everyone around us was a Jew.
I had never seen any Jew but Miryem’s family before, except the woman on the line and her son. Now I did not see anyone else. It was a strange feeling. I thought that when Miryem had to go to the Staryk kingdom maybe it was like this for her. All of a sudden everyone around you was the same as each other but not like you. And then I thought, but it was like that for Miryem already. It was like that for her all the time, in town. So maybe it hadn’t been so strange.
So I was thinking about Miryem, and wondering how it was for her, and that was why suddenly I realized, Panova Mandelstam had come here for Miryem. I stopped in the street. I had not asked why they had come. I had been so full of gladness to see them in the woods, and Stepon, that I had only had room for the gladness and not for any questions. But of course that was why they had come. She was looking for Miryem. But Miryem would not be here.