by Kim Wilkins
The Secret Ambassador is long since past any qualms about the fate of individuals. The fate of Skazki must be ensured: Stasya’s blood must stay in Mir, the ties cannot be allowed to slip completely, and one day…one day…perhaps the magic world will be asked to return in full-round, rather than in shadows and whispers.
In the German suburbs, there is a house owned by a wealthy merchant who has returned to Saxony to look after his ill parents. The Secret Ambassador finds the cellar of this house, knowing it will be visited only by dust and mildew as the years pass. It is here that he ensconces himself, preparing for the magic he must perform. He sits cross-legged on the dirt floor among sacks of mouldering potatoes and begins the humming which puts him in his trance. The floor is cold and a rat skitters across his legs. The humming pulls him and stretches him, as though he is a puppet connected to the sky by a piece of elastic beneath his ribs. A sense of dislocation reverberates through his body, as though he is at once himself and not himself, at once abstract and material. The world around him grows shadowed, then quickly dazzlingly alight as he pulls away from his body with a wrench of ligaments and veins, and vibrates for a moment on the veil.
He is free, but only briefly. The Secret Ambassador needs a means of transport for his soul, and the only transport for a soul is a body. He dives down towards the rat, possessing its cramped body and directing its skittering feet towards the Kremlin. If anyone should come across this miserable cellar, they will find only a cold, slumped man, humming a mindless tune to the passing years.
Shaklovity is on the way to the Terem’s audience chamber, where flattering portraits of all the current Tsarevnas adorn the walls. He is unsuspecting, light of foot. What man of sense and bearing would notice a rat scurrying towards him, much less feel afraid of it? The Secret Ambassador lines up Shaklovity, propels himself forward: out of the rat, into the man.
A struggle ensues as the man is knocked to the ground by invisible forces. Shaklovity grabs at his chest, gibbering. Inside this body it is crowded; the Secret Ambassador sinks, fusing into muscle and bone. The struggle continues in Shaklovity’s mind now, which is not willing to give up its spirit easily. The Mir man pushes against the Secret Ambassador, but the Secret Ambassador’s spirit is fiery and eternal and blinding. Fedor Shaklovity is squeezed out of his body, and sent away to be carried on the whim of light.
The world is different through another’s senses. While everything looks as it always has, the Secret Ambassador notes that the air feels lighter, the sound of boots on flagstones is sharper, that Sofya smells sweeter. When she arrives at the audience chamber, her soft gaze is careworn and vulnerable.
“My friend,” she says, holding out her hands for him to clasp, “someone said you were unwell. That you collapsed just outside.”
“A little fall, nothing to worry about,” he replies with a smile.
“You look ill. Your eyes are very pale.”
The Secret Ambassador smiles inwardly. A soul will always keep its own gaze, even in another’s body: it is true that eyes are windows. Most folk see only what they’ve always seen, or make excuses for dissimilarity. Sofya does not see who is really lurking behind Shaklovity’s gaze. The Golden Bear does, and she feels frightened. She is unsettled to discover that the connection between soul and vessel is not absolute; there is something wholly unnatural about a spirit misplaced.
The Secret Ambassador is now a worm in the ear of the Regent. He fills Sofya with ambition, with schemes, with ideas beyond her station. He orchestrates secret assignations for her with Prince Golitsyn, hoping fervently that she will bear his child and keep Petr off the throne. Sofya does not grow a child, but she does thrive and grow fat. She surrounds herself with luxuries and drapes her generous body in bright, beautiful clothes and jewels: Armenian silk and embroidered velvets, sparkling wristbands catching her sleeves, glossy pearls adorning her hair. The Secret Ambassador manages his anxiety; she is still young, there is time for children. Her half-simple brother, Vanya, wants little to do with power and willingly allows Sofya to take the nation into her hands.
Despite the Secret Ambassador’s counsel, Sofya is too soft. God has made her submissive: she raises her hands in His name and sidelines worldly thought. She feels no sense of urgency about Petr, although he is destined to take his rightful place as the ruler of Russia one day. She ignores warnings and sends him a play army, allows him to roam about, dismisses him as nothing but a silly boy. Golitsyn is her other weakness. She indulges him, and he is an indecisive wastrel. He leads bad military campaigns and she rewards him with honours; he refuses to put aside his wife in a nunnery, and she smiles pleasantly and says she understands. Sofya is content. These years shine for her, and she never pauses long to think of the changes which will ring in darker times.
It is Petr, of course, who changes. All boys become men.
It is a warm July morning, the day which marks the Feast of Our Lady Of Kazan. Sofya takes her usual place in the Cathedral of the Assumption, at Vanya’s side, close to the Metropolitan with his dark embroidered robes and white headdress. Petr and his entourage arrive. It has been some months since Sofya last saw Petr. He has been away at his palace at Kolomonskoe. He looks different, and Sofya can’t, at first, decide what it is. It isn’t his height—the boy has been well over six feet tall since his fifteenth birthday—nor is it his soft beard, which he trims neatly in the European fashion.
It is in his bearing. For the first time, Sofya sees evidence that the boy knows his power. A cold knot of realisation tightens within her. Shaklovity has told her a dozen times, and she has not listened. She will lose power, she will lose Golitsyn and she will lose her freedom. This is inevitable.
Sofya watches Petr with sidelong glances from her seat at the front of the Cathedral. The robes of red and gold, the jewelled icons; the delicious bells and chants twining together and echoing above her. She sees Petr glancing her way from near the door, muttering with his cronies. Sofya finds she cannot keep her mind on the service. Forgive me, God. Be my defender; break the teeth of my enemies. Her brother looms large in her thoughts, an emptied fate beckons. After the service she rises to join the royal procession. To her dismay, Petr breaks from his place in the procession and walks over to her.
“Sister,” he says coldly, “a word with you.”
She turns, and feels all eyes drawn to them. What a sight they must make: she, short and round; he, six-and-a-half feet tall. She barely comes up to his chest, and has to turn her face upwards to meet his fish-eyed gaze. He watches her silently for a moment, his face ticking and twitching as it had done ever since the day he witnessed the revolt of the Streltsy.
“Can it not wait until after the procession?” she says, feeling sweat form on her palms.
“No, for the procession itself is the problem.” He indicates Vanya, head bent as he awaits the cue to start walking. “It is right for the two Tsars to walk in this procession, but not for you.”
“What do you mean? I have entered this holy place with faith, reverence and fear in the Lord. I use my tongue to magnify His name. I belong here as much as you.”
“No. You are only a caretaker, and you are a woman and as such should be confined behind closed doors.”
“I am more than a caretaker,” she protests, realising it is foolish to do so in this place, but unable to stop herself. What else is she to do? Obey his orders? “I have governed this country well and devotedly these seven years—”
“As Regent. Not as Tsar. That honour belongs only to Vanya and me.”
“Are you suggesting—”
“All I am suggesting, sister, is that you remember your place.”
Sofya glances around quickly, trying to gauge the mood of the gathering. She grows flushed and flustered. Defiantly, she seizes the icon from the hands of the Metropolitan, holding it proudly. “I will not step out of the procession,” she says.
Petr’s face screws up in a scowl. “Then I will.” He turns and strides away. A murmur of disapprov
al chases itself around the cathedral. The Tsar not in the procession? It isn’t right. It is bad luck. What is the Tsarevna thinking?
She is thinking about her future, of course, and how it is about to catch up with her.
Petr’s challenge to Sofya is the talk of Moscow. Of course, the Secret Ambassador learns of it and feels the full weight of his frustration with Sofya. He arranges to meet her and Golitsyn in her private apartments. When he arrives, Golitsyn awaits him alone. A musky smell hangs in the air.
“Where is the Tsarevna?” asks the Secret Ambassador.
“She dresses herself,” Golitsyn says, not meeting his eye.
The Secret Ambassador rightly places the odour as the scent of lovemaking. Golitsyn is greying, his skin fits him not so firmly as it once did, and a dullness grows in his eyes. Years of obligatory love have worn him down. He smoothes his clothes and sags into a chair.
“It is not over yet,” the Secret Ambassador whispers.
“What do you mean, Shaklovity?” Golitsyn asks, running a hand through his thin hair.
Sofya flounces in. Her bright blue sarafan is embroidered with gold thread, and a gown of purple velvet is stretched over it. Her pale hair is unbound, but she wears a gold scarf tied in it. Every plump finger is adorned with rings of silver and amber. She glances slyly at Golitsyn, then offers the Secret Ambassador a serious expression.
“Shaklovity, your letter had a tone of urgency—”
“Matters have become urgent. It is time,” he tells them, “to end this decisively. Sofya, you are the rightful heir to the throne. You are Alexis’s daughter, you have ruled fairly and well. You must depose your half-brother, marry Prince Golitsyn and bear many children.”
Prince Golitsyn’s expression of distaste is too evident. Sofya glances away from it, blinking rapidly. The awkwardness seems to echo against the stone walls and return to them magnified.
“I don’t see how it can be done,” she says.
The Secret Ambassador gathers shadows around him, adding weight to his words. “The same as it was done before, but more thoroughly. Not a single Naryshkin should be left alive, and certainly not Petr.”
“You wish to assassinate him?” Golitsyn says, and the tremor in his voice tells the Secret Ambassador he fights a battle which he cannot win.
“His mother’s a whore. For all we know he’s not even really Alexis’s son.”
Sofya is desperate, yet she cannot countenance more blood on her hands. She still suffers nightmares from the first revolt. Help me, save me, have mercy on me, and keep me, Lord, by your grace. On the one hand, the Secret Ambassador’s suggestion strikes precisely at the heart of her ambitions; on the other, she cannot bear to think of more bloodshed. The warring pressures of ambition and godliness squeeze her hard, and she flies into a rage. Her face is mottled pink, and her bosom twitches. “And what of my full brother, Vanya?” she asks. “Am I to kill him, too! Would you make me commit fratricide?” She turns away and walks five paces to a carved ebony dresser, where she leans over and breathes heavily. The Secret Ambassador sees her shoulders shake.
“No, no. Vanya doesn’t want to be Tsar, you know that. He wants only a quiet home and a comfortable life.”
“You go too far, Shaklovity,” she says, evidently trying to keep her voice under control. “We are not killers.” She turns and points a trembling finger at him. “Not another word of it. I have too much murder in my memory already.”
Poor Sofya. She cannot be cruel, and for that she loses everything. Perhaps it is true that a woman cannot rule.
The end comes for her softly and weakly, not with a sudden thunderous rush. At the Secret Ambassador’s will, rumours and intrigues fly, a storm of innuendo builds. Rather than bringing a revolt, it brings only confusion. Golitsyn leaves Sofya, the Patriarch defects to Petr’s side, a number of commanders of the Streltsy throw in their lot with the Naryshkins and, before long, the foreign guard too. Sofya bends her neck to Petr’s judgement and is sent to the Novodevichy Convent where her hair is shorn and her unwieldy body is enfolded in plain black robes.
Shaklovity is delivered into the enemy’s hands.
The Secret Ambassador finds himself trapped in a body intended for the torture chamber. Ordinarily this wouldn’t trouble him, for he need only hum for a short time and he can jump from Shaklovity’s body, but his captors, incensed by the first of the toneless humming, force a bit between his teeth. It tastes like old blood and mould and it keeps his lips from vibrating against one another. The chamber is dark and damp, and the screams of other poor souls fill the air. The Secret Ambassador is perplexed. He tries to hum in his throat, but the vibration is not fine enough for magic.
His torturers first lie him on the ground and sit on his head and knees, beating him up and down with the baton until all his ribs are broken. He hopes that they will remove the bit to take a confession from him, but these torturers are not interested in what he has to say. This torture is not for interrogation, it is simply a prelude to his execution. Hot coals are forced into his ears, his shoulders are dislocated, the knout tears the skin from his back, and the Secret Ambassador is trapped through this agony in a claustrophobic and broken body.
Once removed to the block, the bit is torn from his mouth and he begins to hum. He summons all his self-control not to shout in pain when his hands and feet are chopped off. He feels the dislocation of body and soul begin. He can see a duck waddling in dirty puddles beside the stone wall of the Kremlin. A crowd has gathered to watch his death; they shout and throw mud. Still he hums. The axe is raised, its shadow falls, its bite on his skin—
Then he is away, out and over the crowd, directing himself awkwardly into the duck and waddling down to the German suburbs. There, he finds his own cold body and walks in it once more.
What alarm he feels as he walks over fields and through forests, along rivers and over hills. Everywhere he goes he sees signs that Skazki’s power is weakening: the family which doesn’t leave blini and vodka for the domovoi, the girls who haven’t learned midwinter divination from their mothers, the youths who do not plough the crossroads to protect their livestock. Certainly, there are many who do, but Mir is giving up on magic as surely as the years are passing. Petr legislates against charms, enchantments and other superstitions. Sofya, last of the Skazki blood, is confined to a convent. Is he doomed only to wait for news of her death so he can return to his homeland and let the connection falter and dissolve? A last attempt, then, at winning her to his side.
Sofya’s rooms at the convent are comfortable enough, with cushions and warm furs, many candles in gilt holders and tapestries to stop the cold from leeching out of the stone walls, but the rooms are empty of voices, of laughter and whispered promises. Sofya lives by herself here. She sees the nuns once a day for supper, but they do not converse about love or about freedom. Outside her chamber window, hung in the most advantageous position for viewing, are ninety-five rotting corpses—the bodies of the men who dared to plot against Petr in Sofya’s name. The crows come and peck at them, bits drop off onto the stone walk below, and the ripe smell seeps through cracks under the windows to linger around her while she sleeps.
When the Secret Ambassador steals into her chambers, sunlight sends its first streaks over the horizon. The nearest body, hanging on its beam, is silhouetted by dawn. It slowly turns on its rope: north to south, south to north, creaking. The Secret Ambassador sits on the edge of a chair, elbows on his knees, while he waits for Sofya to return from Matins.
Sofya, divested of her regal splendour, appears smaller than remembered when she arrives.
“I hadn’t expected to see your kind here,” she says, closing the door firmly behind her. “Especially not in a place of holiness.” Secretly, she is glad to see somebody. Alone, she grows bitter. She has lost her freedom and somewhere along the way she has lost her spirit.
“Listen to me, Tsarevna,” the Secret Ambassador says, “not all is lost for you.”
“Don’t fill my h
ead with your heathen nonsense.”
“Sofya, you carry in your veins the blood of Skazki, the other world you fear so much. You are its daughter.”
“I won’t listen.”
“The Golden Bear, the favoured ornament of your childhood, was made in Skazki. You treasured it because you recognised it as being of your own kind.”
A sense of familiarity resonates in Sofya. That bear: how she had loved it. “I should like to see that bear again,” she says.
“And so you shall, when you are crowned Empress of all the Russias.”
“These dreams are long since gone cold, Secret Ambassador.” She paces to the window, tries to look past the dark bodies which line her view. “What need have I for power? It won’t fill the emptiness.”
“If power doesn’t interest you, then what of love? I could bring a man to you, to implant his seed. Children, Sofya, little babies to hold and keep as your own.”
She bends her head to the window, her forehead touching the cool panes. “A man? What man?”
“Somebody tall and strong, with hot skin—”
“Golitsyn?”
The Secret Ambassador hesitates.
“He is gone,” she says. “I know. Banished to the Siberian snowfields. I will not see him again.” She turns, tilts her head to one side. Her brows are very dark and heavy. “No other man will ever touch me. My skin would die from sadness.”
The Secret Ambassador entertains a brief fantasy of forcing himself upon her, raping her, but he cannot father a child. The old gods that made him ensured he couldn’t reproduce and bring another like him into the world, as much as he likes to indulge himself in Mir flesh. He wants to weep into his palms. All is lost! Skazki blood will die with her. The worlds will forever remain apart. Skazki will fade away to watercolour pictures.