Now Wanda was saying no because there wasn’t anything worse that the Staryk could do to her but take Miryem away. And I wasn’t sure if I thought so myself, but then I thought, I could not let go without making Panova Mandelstam and Panov Mandelstam let go too, because their arms were around me. And being dead would not be as bad as having to look at Panova Mandelstam after I did that to her.
But the Staryk was not lying either. It was not like with Da where there was Sergey to come in and be stronger than him and push him into the fire. Sergey was already helping as much as he could, and none of us were as big and strong as the Staryk. So we were going to all be dead. There was nothing we could do about it except let go. And we were not going to let go.
And then a hoarse awful wet voice said, “A chain of silver to bind him tight, a ring of fire to quench his might,” and all around us twelve great candles lit in flame. I looked around and the tsar was standing again: the tsarina had put those candles in a big circle all around us, while we were trying to hold the Staryk, and then she had gone to the tsar and helped him stand up in the fireplace. She was holding him up, and he had said those words out of his broken mouth even though they came out in popping red bubbles of blood. He was pointing his hand out: it was shaking and the fingers were bent in terrible ways, but with one finger he was pointing, and all the candles burst into tall hot flames almost as long as the candles were tall.
Inside the chain, the Staryk gave a choking gasp, and the armor of ice around him broke off in great chunks and fell to the ground with small tinkling sounds. He went white all the way through. And then the tsar laughed aloud, except it was not the tsar laughing, it was Chernobog, it was the monster. It was a terrible sound like fire crackling up, and then he took a dragging step out of the fireplace, and when he did, a few of those fingers that were bent all wrong straightened out. When he took another step, his shoulder that was turned in a bad way jerked itself right, and then his nose that was broken fixed itself too, and little by little as he came closer all of him went right again, until his face was perfect and even his torn red coat was smooth and not even wet anymore. But he wasn’t right at all, there was nothing right about anything in him, and he was coming towards us.
He reached up and spun his hand in the air, and the chain pulled itself out of Wanda and Sergey’s hands and wrapped tight around the Staryk, pulling his arms against his sides. Miryem pulled her hand out of his grip and jumped back from him, and then we all scrambled back, as fast as we could, to get away from Chernobog. But he wasn’t paying any attention to us. He was going to stand in front of the Staryk and smiling at him. The last link of the chain on the left side opened up like a jaw and closed itself around a link far along on the other, and the last link of the chain on the right side bound itself to a link on that side, and it was tight and tight around him.
“I have you, I have you,” Chernobog crooned. He reached up and touched the Staryk’s face with one finger and drew it down his cheek and over his throat, and steam rose off into the air and the Staryk had his jaw tight and it was hurting him. Chernobog half closed his eyes and gave a little crackling noise that was happy, only it was happy about something horrible. I wanted the wax back in my ears but I didn’t know where it was. I was holding tight to Wanda’s hand, and Sergey was standing in front of us, and Miryem and her mother and father were all holding each other tight.
“Tell me,” Chernobog said to the Staryk. “Tell me your name.” And he reached up and touched him again.
The Staryk shuddered all over, but he whispered, “Never.”
Chernobog made a crackling of anger and laid his whole hand flat down against the Staryk’s chest. A horrible white cloud burst out around his hand and went writhing around them, and the Staryk cried out aloud. “Your name, your name!” Chernobog hissed. “You are bound, I have you; I will have you whole! Tell me your name! By the binding I command you!”
The Staryk had shut his terrible eyes and was shaking in the silver chain, and his face was drawn up and looked very sharp on all the edges like it was pulled tight. He was breathing like he could not do anything but breathe, and that was all he could think about, but when he stopped having just to breathe, he opened his eyes again and said in a thin faint voice, “You have not bound me, Chernobog; you hold my chains, but I owe you no surrender. Neither by your hand nor by your cunning am I bound. You have not paid for this victory, false one, cheat, and I will give you nothing.”
Chernobog made a vast snarling hiss and whirled on us—on the tsarina. “Irina, Irina, what will you have? Name a gift, it shall be yours, name even two or three! Only take a payment from my hands and give him true to me.”
But the tsarina shook her head. “No,” she said. “I brought him to you, as I promised, and that is all I promised. I will not take anything from you. I have done this for Lithvas and not for greed. Is he not bound? Can you not break his winter?”
Chernobog was very angry, and he went prowling in a big circle around the Staryk muttering and crackling and hissing to himself, but he didn’t say no. “I will feast upon you every day,” he muttered as he coiled around the Staryk, and he put up his hand and dragged his fingers across the Staryk’s face, leaving more deep steaming lines. “Sweet and cold will each draught be. Each one will burn you to the quick. How long will you say no to me?”
“Forever,” the Staryk whispered. “Though you feast upon me to the end of days, I will never unlock my kingdom’s gates, and you will have nothing of me you do not steal.”
“I will steal everything!” Chernobog said. “I have you chained, I have you held fast. I will steal all the fruit of your white trees and devour them whole; I will drink your servants and your crown, I will bring all your mountain down!”
“And even then,” the Staryk said. “Even then will I refuse you. My people will go into the flame with their names locked fast in their hearts; you will not have that of them, nor me.”
Chernobog roared in fury and seized him with both his hands on either side of the Staryk’s face, and the Staryk shrieked like before only worse, like the sound Da made when the kasha came on his head, and I put my face in Wanda’s skirt and covered my ears but I couldn’t keep the sound out, even though she put her hands over my ears also and pressed with me. When it stopped I was shaking. The Staryk was on his knees on the ground with the chain still wrapped around him, and Chernobog was standing over him and his hands were dripping wet, and he put one to his mouth and licked it with his tongue, and where his tongue went over it, his hand was dry after. “Oh, how sweet the taste, how the cold lingers!” he said. “Winter king, king of ice, I will suck you until you are so small I can crunch you with my teeth, and what will your name be worth then? Will you not give it to me now and go into the flame while you are still great?”
The Staryk trembled all over, and then he said, very faintly, only, “No,” and it was the same as our no had been, it was a no that said no matter what Chernobog did to him, it was not as bad as if the Staryk gave him his name.
Chernobog made a disappointed crackling noise. “Then I will keep you bound in silver and bound in flame, until you change your mind and give me your name! Call them!” he shrieked. “Call them and take him and hide him away!” and suddenly he lurched over and nearly fell, staggering so he knocked chairs over and grabbed at them until he had one that didn’t fall over, and held him up even though he was shaking, and his head was hanging down. The tsarina suddenly went across the room to him, and he looked at her, and it was the way a person looks at someone, it was not Chernobog there anymore. He said after a moment, almost a whisper, “The guards,” and his voice was very beautiful, like music even though he was only talking very softly.
He turned and pointed his hand at the doors, the way he had pointed it at the candles, except now his hand was straight and perfect, and they opened. The sleigh was not out there anymore. It was just the empty courtyard. “Guards!” the tsar called loud, and men came running into the courtyard. They were men wh
o did have swords and armor, but when they saw the Staryk they stopped, afraid, and stared. They made signs in front of themselves.
The tsar started to point his hand at them, the same way he had pointed it at the door and at the candles, but suddenly the tsarina reached out and put her hand on his arm and pushed it down. She said to those men, “Have courage!” They all looked up at her. “This is the lord of the Staryk, who brought this evil cursed winter to our land, and with the blessing of God he has been captured. We must lock him away to bring spring back to Lithvas. Are you all God-fearing men? Bless yourselves, and each of you take a candle in your hands, and keep them around him! And we must find a rope to tie to the chain that binds him, and draw him along.”
Those guards all looked very afraid, but one of them who was very tall, as tall as Sergey, and had a big mustache, said to the tsarina, “Your Majesty, I will dare it, for your sake,” and he went and brought a rope out of the courtyard and he went straight up to the Staryk and tied the rope to the chain very fast, and then he stepped back, wincing, and I saw his hands were hurt at the tips of the fingers, all white and blanched as if they were frostbitten. But he had the rope, and some other men came and helped him now and pulled on it. The Staryk stood up on his feet so that they would not just drag him along the floor. The other guards had come and taken the candles and were all around him.
But when they tried to pull him, he did not just go with them. Instead he turned around and looked at Miryem. She was standing with her parents and staring at him. They had their arms around her, and her face was all sick and worried as if she was still afraid, even though the Staryk was bound up. But he did not try to get to her. He only said, as if he was very surprised, “My lady, I did not think you could answer it, when I took you from your home without your leave, and set value only on your gift. But I am answered truly. You have given fair return for insult thrice over and set your worth: higher than my life and all my kingdom and all who live therein, and though you send my people to the fire, I can claim no debt to repay. It is justly done.”
He bowed to her, very deeply, and then turned and he went with the guards where they were pulling him, and Miryem put her hands on her forehead and made a sound like she wanted to cry and said, “What can I do? What am I going to do?”
CHAPTER 20
It wasn’t really much of a surprise to discover that my beloved tsarina’s father had a secret dungeon hidden outside the city walls, buried under a mat of grass and straw. It was the same sort of careful, well-thought-out advance preparation I was beginning to expect from my darling queen; he’d certainly trained her well.
There was a door in the wall around the Jewish quarter, a narrow door at the end of an alleyway tucked between two houses, not far from the one where the wedding had been. Irina led us all to it, the Staryk a silent figure that might have been carved of salt among the guards with their candles, while I brought up the rear of the procession. We must have made quite a picture of hellish sorcery underway. In my belly the demon—Chernobog, and how delightful to finally have a name for my passenger; we were finally growing familiar after all these years—still writhed around itself and purred with joy. It was just as well that the hour was late, and no one left in the streets but drunkards and beggars.
At the wall, Irina pushed aside a curtain of ivy and opened the door with a key from her purse, and at her direction half the guardsmen carefully stepped out one after another, keeping the ring of candles around our silent prisoner, before the tall, handsome, excessively brave one at the head tugged on the rope and pulled him through. The Staryk went unresisting, even though he couldn’t possibly have been pulled by force. I still felt phantom echoes all over my body from everywhere that the Staryk’s hands had struck me, every blow like being hammered on an anvil, as if I’d been well-heated metal to be beaten flat.
But the demon had kept hurling me at him, grabbing my shattered hands furiously on open air even while my ribs pierced into my lungs, my hips cracked apart so that my legs dangled, my jaw hung loose with teeth falling out of it like loose pebbles. I could have been crushed into wine-pulp and still I think Chernobog would have been oozing me over the floor to glaze his boots with my blood. When the Staryk finally pushed us into the fireplace and told the demon to stay there, I would have wept with gratitude, with relief, if only he’d done me the kindness of one final parting kick to crush my skull and end the agony.
But he left me there. And then my sweet Irina came and put her arms around me like some grotesque parody of comfort. If she’d wanted to comfort me, she could have slit my throat. But she had a use for me, she too had a use for me, I’m so endlessly useful; she knelt and said to me urgently, “The ring of fire. Can you light the candles?” At first I think I only wept at her a little, or maybe laughed, as much as I could make any sound at all come out of my mouth. The experience was rather cloudy in my memory. But then she took me by the shoulders and said fiercely, “You’ll be trapped here forever if we don’t stop him!” and I woke to the gruesome horrified certainty that she was right.
Oh, I thought I already knew a fate worse than death; how absurdly, ridiculously naïve I’d been. I wasn’t broken enough to die, only to lie there in the cinders and the ash. I imagined the household fled, everyone in the neighboring houses fled, from the horror of the twisted wreck of me in the fireplace. They’d board up the windows and the doors, and maybe they’d burn the whole building down and bury me in a mountain of blackened timbers, and I’d be lying underneath it forever with the demon still howling in my ears, devouring me because it couldn’t get to anyone else.
So I did get up, and with a feeble croaking spell and a trickle of the magic my demon had given me, a ragged scrap of meat tossed to an adequately obedient dog, I captured the Staryk king for my beloved queen and my beloved master. And now here I was rewarded: I was whole again! I could breathe without a fountain of blood gurgling in my throat! I could stand and walk and see out of both my eyes, and oh, how grateful I was for it, except I understood that I hadn’t escaped anything. I’d only deferred it for a while. That fate was waiting for me, sooner or later. Chernobog would never let me go, not even to death. Why would it? It didn’t have to. I’d been signed over comprehensively; no fine print or limitations on my term. All I would ever be able to do about it was what I’d ever been able to do about it: nothing. Nothing but to catch at those scraps of life when they came, and devour them, and lick my greasy fingers, and try to make life endurable when I had the chance.
So I let myself breathe in the night air, and I looked at my once-again beautiful well-formed hands, and I followed my queen and my guardsmen through the streets and through the narrow door, because as long as Chernobog had a Staryk to feast upon, I wouldn’t need to fear. It felt heavy and replete inside my belly, a well-fed monster, almost somnolent with satisfaction. Long might it sleep so.
Outside the wall, Irina took us out onto the hill, to a place beside a small wizened tree, and told the guards to put down the candles in a circle around the Staryk, and then she said, “You have served Lithvas and God tonight. You will be rewarded for what you have done. Now go back to the city, and before you return to the palace, go straight to the church and give thanks, and speak to no one of what you have seen tonight.”
They all fled promptly, the obviously sensible men they were, except for our one brave hero, who set down the rope carefully inside the ring of candles, and asked Irina, “Your Majesty, may I not stay and serve you?”
Irina looked at him and asked, “What is your name?”
“Timur Karimov, Your Majesty,” he said. Yes, very eager to serve her, that was patently obvious, although he’d want payment for it sooner or later, I imagined. However, as soon as I’d had the thought, it occurred to me—he had a Tatar strain himself: dark-skinned and handsome and broad-shouldered, and judging by that mustache he had dark hair to go with his light eyes. And if Irina didn’t insist on my providing stud services, someone was going to have to do the work. r />
“Timur Karimov, you have shown your worth,” I said, and startled him into noticing that yes, that was her husband standing right there, her husband the tsar of Lithvas who could have his eyes put out and his tongue slit and his head and hands cut off and nailed over the castle gate, and all for the effort of saying a word. I would have taken some small satisfaction in seeing him look a little nervous, but instead he only saw me and then looked—crumpled, with miserable envy, as if he didn’t actually hope to enjoy any favors after all, he only dreamed longingly of his shining ideal from afar, and had temporarily forgotten that she was out of his reach. Well, perhaps he could be cured of that lack of ambition. “I hereby appoint you captain of the tsarina’s personal guard, and may you ever show as much courage in protecting my greatest treasure as you have this night.”
Evidently I overdid it; he lunged forward to fall down on one knee at my feet and seized my hand and kissed it. “Your Majesty, I swear it on my life,” he said, in throbbing tones, as if he thought he were acting in a play, only it sounded as though he really was on the verge of bursting into tears.
“Yes, very well,” I said, drawing my hand away. Irina was looking at me with a little frown, as if she didn’t understand my motives; I gave a pointed look down at the charming young gallant’s bowed head and then her cheeks darkened in a completely unwarranted maidenly flush as lo, the sudden light dawned! As though she had grounds at all for not understanding in the first place after those lectures to me on dynastic succession. “Well?” I added to her. I felt quite comfortable keeping Timur around; he wasn’t going to be telling our secrets to anyone, not to betray her beautiful beloved Majesty.
Irina must have worked that out herself as well, because after a moment she pointed him to a spot in the ground in front of the Staryk’s feet and said, “Dig there.”