“The arrow’s not going to land on anything else until we stop circling,” said Mewster. “You have to stop the wind.”
“Ha,” said Baba Yaga. “I may be a powerful player in the demimonde, but nothing can stop the wind.”
Anton chirped up, “I heard that if a butterfly flapped its wings in China, by the time that little breeze crossed the Pacific, it could grow into a hurricane.”
“What’s your point?”
Anton shrugged. “Well, a few moths have been following Elena ever since we picked her up.”
It was true. Three or four moths, minding their own business, were inspecting the edges of the carpet upon which the girls had settled.
The witch drummed the tips of her fingers on her forehead. “Do-it-yourself anti-tornado techniques? I’d say don’t try this at home, but we are at home. Well, okay. When in doubt, try reverse Chaos Theory. Everybody cup a moth in your hands, and position yourselves at one of the windows.”
Elena balked. “You, too, Miss Misery,” snapped the witch. “No free rides.”
There were just enough moths to go around, since Mewster didn’t want to play, and anyway had no hands. Cat, Anton, Baba Yaga, and a dubious Elena: each stood at an open window at one of the four walls of the izba.
The witch began to recite. Her delivery was a little nasal.
“What’s a moth but
Hinge and bracket,
Neatly clothed
In purple jacket?
Humble agents
All together
Have the strength
To change the weather.
Help us now
To stem this storm.
Use your influence.
Moths, perform.”
Elena couldn’t follow the spell. Still, the moth in her own hands began to flutter more urgently. “Don’t let it out,” advised the witch. “Just knot your fingers and part them. Make a finger-cage, so the breeze can emerge. Then put your clamped fists out the window about a foot — out to the elbow, say.”
This the children did. Cat laughed at the soft bump of moth against her tender palms. Elena’s teeth were gritted.
A moth is so insubstantial. The wind from its wing flappings couldn’t be felt by human hands. Baba Yaga’s hands, apparently, were more sensitive, and she hummed a few more lines of guidance to the moths.
“Row, row, row your wings,
Till we can alight, where
Scarily, scarily, scarily, scarily,
Life’s a living nightmare.”
“I do believe our revolving is slowing down,” said the kitten. The table began to walk in circles around the room in the opposite direction, and the other furniture followed it. The legs of the bathtub, Elena noticed, were duck’s feet, and those of the wardrobe apparently the stubby cloven pegs of a wild boar. Home furnishings on promenade. The chesterfield betrayed a touch of sashay in its gait.
Above them, in the center of the room, the floating nest holding the Fabergé egg was revolving more slowly, until it came to a stop. Then, after a few moments, it began to turn again, this time in the opposite direction.
“My ears are beginning to pop,” said Cat.
“Mine, too,” said Anton, and Elena nodded.
“My nose is about to pop,” said the witch. “A falling barometer. We’re dropping fast. I hope not too fast. Maybe we should all draw our arms in about six inches.”
But it was impossible now to control the house. It was circling in the opposite direction, more and more quickly.
“Release your moths!” cried Baba Yaga. They obeyed. The moths from the Saint Petersburg House of Solitary Confinement spun their way into the white-black snowy wind and were never seen again, at least not by the travelers. More liberated prisoners.
The house’s descent slowed, but not fast enough. It came to earth in a catastrophic way at the top of a slope. Thumping with a terrific bang, it fell onto its side and began to slide. Snow sluiced through a ground-facing window and built up in a bank, burying Baba Yaga to her chin, which she used as a shovel to start digging herself out.
Elena and Cat tumbled into the open door of the wardrobe and were cushioned from concussion by an assortment of fur coats. Anton landed on the carpet. It rucked up as it slalomed, providing a fabric bolster when he collided with the bathtub, which fell, trapping him.
The duck legs of the tub waggled about in the air. Elena and Cat pulled themselves through the door of the wardrobe. When Dumb Doma shuddered to a stop at last, the front door was facing the ground, the ceiling pointed left and the floor right, and snow was heaped inside everywhere.
Cat and Elena overturned the tub and released Anton, who was raw and scratched from his plight. Then they ran to the witch. Cat and Elena each took hold of one of her hands, and Anton grabbed her chin, which was knobby enough to provide some purchase, and they pulled at her until she popped out.
Mewster was still sitting complacently atop the Fabergé egg, regarding the mess below. He smirked. “Game over,” he said to the witch. “But did you win or lose?”
“Where are we?” asked Cat.
They scrambled to see out the windows. The moth-wing magic had worked just fine. It had counterbalanced the snow tornado, which after depositing Dumb Doma on the ground had spun on and eventually tipped over. The remnants of the whirlwind lassoed along the horizon, breaking up into little twisters. Eventually they petered out or were lost in the distance.
“You were asking where true winter went,” said Mewster. “Apparently it winters here.”
“But I wonder,” said the witch. “Have we achieved North, or are we somewhere entirely else?” She turned to Elena. “What do you think?”
Elena consulted the doll. In the impact of landing, the needle had sprung off the dial and could say no more about where they were. “I think,” ventured Elena, “we’re here.”
I’ve noticed in the stories of saints and their careers, of knights and their quests, a presumption of purity. It seems only the most single-minded candidate qualifies for passage into holy or magic realms, those sanctuaries more inspired than our commonplace worlds of today, yesterday, tomorrow.
Yet I wonder if earnest self-assurance is strictly necessary. What motivated Elena wasn’t conviction, but regret and anger. Doubt, too: she was at war with herself: wanting to rush home, wanting to be brave enough to forge ahead. She was hardly stout-hearted. For all I know, maybe Cat and Anton weren’t really, either. But it was Elena who was to venture the farthest, so it is her case that interests us most.
Here we see her at the cold dawn of a vision. She twists, she writhes. She is anything but bold. Rather, she’s petty and ashamed, mournful and curious, somewhat fouler of tongue than I’ve allowed myself to write, and her big imagination hasn’t served her as well as we might have hoped. She is, in short, a bit of a mess. She is all we have.
I’ve tried not to weigh in with my own assessment on her character. Who am I to judge? I merely observe her here, a hank of half-brushed hair clouding her left brow. No symmetry, no balance, no grace to speak of. Impatient, affectionate, lately prone to despair. Her bootlaces are untied.
Why Baba Yaga, who eats children, is in awe of Elena is a mystery I cannot answer. But I am in awe of her, too, and I can’t explain that, either. Maybe it is simply that the girl has been less cozened into her own character than the others have, less educated to be this way or that.
I don’t insist that rural innocence is always superior. It is often stupider. But every raw soul has its own secret advantages. Elena had hers, and those advantages might as well be termed perplexity. Perplexity isn’t as noble as conviction, but perhaps more good is done in the name of muddling through uncertainty than is done hacking away with the righteous sword of self-confidence. I don’t know. And that’s my perplexity.
“What are we waiting for?” she said, and flung open the door.
Don’t be hasty,” cautioned the witch. “Frankly, I don’t have the snowiest idea where we are. It l
ooks lunar, doesn’t it? I don’t believe it snows on the moon, but then I’ve never been.” She rubbed her chin. “Have you ever seen a more desolate place? I do believe, honeybuckets, that we’re not in Kansas anymore. Or Kamchatka.”
It was still midnight — midnight somewhere, though whether this was midnight in Russia or the moon, no one could say. A powder-white world under a black sky riveted with stars. Far off, a swipe of shadow that might be a line of tundra vegetation. The air had a crispness to it that made it feel it couldn’t snow here. It was too dry, too brittle.
Elena said, “Well, if we’ve come to look, let’s start looking. I’ve got to get home. I have a mother to nurse back to health.”
“Are you commandeering my mission?” The witch reared back.
“Govern yourself, we have company,” Elena replied.
A little bit of Miss Bristol goes a very long way, thought Cat, while the house righted itself, not wanting to be seen in disarray. I suppose it was house-proud.
Someone was moving out there. It walked upright like a bear or some sort of a snow gorilla. It hulked about on two stiff legs. Then perhaps it noticed them, for it moved closer, growing larger by the moment. A shambling creature dragging its own shadow with it. As if the shadow had weight.
They stared at the creature, wondering if the welcome would be hostile or hospitable. “Who could it be, do you suppose?” asked Baba Yaga.
The children glanced at her. “I’m a stranger here myself,” she reminded them.
Anton felt he was about to be harshly dealt with. “It looks like the Tsar. ”
“No, more like Saint Nicholas,” said Cat, “though he doesn’t walk in golden air, as he does in all the ikons.”
“It looks like —” began Elena, but she didn’t finish: My father.
Baba Yaga said, “Perhaps it’s that mad Brother Uri who was advising the Tsar about the influence of the Firebird’s bright, unseen shadow.”
“How could he be here?” asked Anton.
“How should I know? Maybe he hopped an earlier tornado?”
The figure was now large enough to make out as human. He was clothed in shaggy skins so heavy with ice that he clinked when he walked.
“A Laplander shaman, maybe,” muttered Baba Yaga. “A berdache? Say hello.”
“I don’t know languages,” said Elena. “Cat, you’re glib; you try.”
“You think he speaks Parisian French? Or the King’s English?” said Cat.
The creature stopped ten feet before the hut of Baba Yaga, at the open door of which — now that it was front and center as it ought to be — the travelers had gathered. He straightened, a giant. His nose looked like a broken adze. His flared nostrils were large enough to store whole walnuts. It made Elena remember taking nuts from the squirrel at the cemetery at Miersk. Where her father was buried in an unmarked grave, unless blossoms scattered randomly should fall upon it.
“This is uncommonly forward of us,” started Anton.
The man blinked as if surprised at sound.
“We are newcomers here in, um, wherever we are,” said Elena.
The man looked behind him as if to check and see if someone had come up in the lee of his crisp star-shadow. He heard them but didn’t see them.
“Bonsoir, Monsieur,” tried Cat, and in English: “A very fine evening indeed to you, if you please, good sir?”
He let his furred hood fall back, revealing a woolen cap from which locks of grey-white hair escaped. The cap was knitted all around with images of rust-colored reindeer.
Quite improbably — though what part of this is probable?— a snowy owl perched on his shoulder. The owl blinked at them.
“Oh, bother, I have to do everything,” said Baba Yaga. She pushed the children aside and hopped down to the hard snow surface. She marched up to the wanderer, easily three times her size, and stuck out her hand. “Put ’er there, pardner,” she said. “When there isn’t so much as a doorbell, it’s hard to give you notice that we’ve arrived on your doorstep. But we mean no harm.”
He didn’t glance down. He closed his eyes, sniffed probingly, and his brown brow furled.
From behind them, Mewster said, “We’re not invited, but we come in peace.”
Mewster spoke in an ordinary cat voice, but the isolated pilgrim of the snow seemed to hear him. “Where are you?” replied the great shaggy man, in a language they couldn’t identify but could somehow understand.
“Here before you, blown into your realm by winds from the overheated south.” Mewster snaked between the ankles of the children and jumped down upon the snow next to the witch.
“Oh, suddenly you’ve got diplomatic papers?” But Baba Yaga’s voice betrayed some admiration for her familiar.
The shambolic man said, “Lapland does not welcome strangers. The Saami Sámi Lapi do not welcome strangers.”
“You are not Lapland, and you are not the people,” said Mewster. As he spoke, he seemed to grow larger. Cat had forgotten the lion or leopard in the slushy forests around Baba Yaga’s hut. Mewster had some tricks up his own furry sleeves.
“Who are you?” The man’s low voice was puzzled but not fearful. “Show yourself to me.”
Mewster, growling, paced with nonchalance, like a cat walking through a room pretending not to be the most glamorous thing there. As he walked, his sleek mouse-grey fur took on the sheen of snow-light. He turned, and luminescence bathed him on one side. When he circled back to the ambassador of the North, he was no longer a dust-colored kitten but a great white snow tiger.
Now, it seemed, the man could see Mewster, though the children were pretty sure that he didn’t take in their presence, nor that of Baba Yaga or her house. “You stray beyond your territory, cat.”
“Cats mark their own territories,” said Mewster. “Who are you to complain?”
“I am Myandash,” he replied. With his gloved hand he threw off his knit cap. From his head grew a rack of antlers that added another four feet to his height and cast the shadow of barren branches upon the snow.
Mewster couldn’t maintain sleek arrogance in front of this creature. “This is your home,” he admitted, his voice sullen. “So I ask permission to pace the ice.”
“You risk too much, cat. The ice has become unreliable.”
“That’s why I’m here, to see for myself.”
“You are an eastern tiger, an Amur, a Siberian. You are no friend of my people.”
“I’m no enemy, nor are my associates.”
“I sense others. Where are they?”
“Here with me. They are young, so invisible to you.”
“I’m not that young,” whispered Baba Yaga, “but I’m young at heart, so maybe that counts. Let’s not quibble.”
Myandash spoke over her. “How many are you?”
“Legions,” said the cat.
“My people, the Saami Sámi Lapi, belong to this land. From Nova Zembla to the North Sea, the reindeer people hunt and fish and migrate with the weather. There is nothing here to support a delegation of legions. Go away.”
“We are legion in possibility,” Mewster explained. “The young, who are fruitful, carry their future coiled in their living lives.”
“This is no place for your young,” said the reindeer-man. “Our own young see their world threatened and their future evaporating before their eyes.”
“We know. We have come to help. Did you call us here? Did you bring us here on that stack of wind?”
“I do not push the winds around; I do not break the ice nor heal it. I pace to observe. But I do not expect to see a snow tiger so far from its homeland.”
“The world is sickening,” said Mewster. “The ailment affects snow tigers in Siberia and humans in the cities. It beggars the boll weevils and shrivels the winter wheat. It dances the figures of ancient belief out of their stories and even threatens the renaissance of the Firebird.”
Myandash looked uncertain, but he nodded, slowly. “I had not known the trouble was so widely felt.”
>
“We know the effects, but not the cause.”
“Ah, the cause.” The creature bowed his head. “That’s why you have come, to investigate?”
“To investigate. To help, if we can.”
“Armies of men young enough to father children can be no help against this calamity, this wakeful fuse. This aberration.”
“Myandash, you see whatever there is to see in the land of the Saami Sámi Lapi. But we come from beyond your territory, and our army is mighty.”
I do hope he’s not talking about us, thought Cat. She glanced at Anton, who was throwing his shoulders back, being a warrior. Cat couldn’t tell if she liked Anton at all or found him juvenile. Perhaps both at once.
“First tell us where we are; then tell us where we are going,” said Mewster.
Myandash was silent for quite a while, considering whether to answer. He sighed. “You find yourselves beyond Archangel, in the region of tundra that gives onto the pack ice. An hour or two north by human tread, you reach the place where the sea should not be at this time of year, but the sea is there. And the wakeful sickness sinks hot jaws into the bay. You risk everything to proceed any farther than you are.”
“Tell him, out of our way,” snapped Baba Yaga.
“We ask your permission to venture north,” said Mewster.
“This year and last, I have herded my people to the western edge of the Murman Sea, to the lands that usually claim them only in the summer,” said the reindeer-man. “North from here is too dangerous for living creatures now. But I will not forbid you, nor will I allow it. I am no longer the spirit guide here. I, too, am losing my strength.”
With that, Myandash turned away from Mewster and the invisible others. He began walking to the west. Though he put on his cap and drew the hood back up over his head, the shadow of his antlers trailed after him still, like great blue cracks in the polar ice. He walked with the heavy step of someone in mourning.
Perhaps for cloven-hoofed reindeer, the edge of the most northern sea in the world was a two-hour trek. For Dumb Doma, it took almost five hours. The house kicked up sprays of chalky snow. Once it fell through a drift up to its hocks. It had the deuce of a time climbing out.