The snowy owl from Myandash’s antlers accompanied them. Perhaps she was leading them, perhaps just keeping an eye on them. It was hard to tell. She flew ahead, flew back, occasionally perching on the roof.
Something like sunrise began to show.
Though Mewster had returned to being as cute as a carved toy, Baba Yaga fumed. “At this point in my career, to be upstaged by a common house cat! Who would’ve been eaten by some marten or … or … some skunk, if I hadn’t come to the rescue! And now, the airs! I’ll thank you to remember your place.”
“You aren’t the only raisin in the pudding,” replied Mewster. “I’ve done you a service you didn’t request. Maybe now you’ll let me go?” She ignored him and went stomping about, abusing the furniture, shutting up her skulls in a valise. Evidence, Cat guessed, of the witch’s mounting fear of losing her strength and vivacity. In any case, Baba Yaga was so busy being annoyed that she wasn’t in the mood for chatter.
So the two girls and the prince did what children do. They paid no mind to the ill-tempered adult and got to know one another by horsing about, making the adult more ill-tempered than ever.
Cat was finding herself more comfortable with Elena. She wasn’t sure why. She guessed that when they had been Mademoiselle Ekaterina the Privileged and Elena the Peasant, the differences between them had been too vast. They had both worn their circumstances upon their shoulders like disguises (Elena’s like a wooden yoke, Cat’s like a Liberty scarf). But they’d traded places, and now, in Baba Yaga’s hut near the top of the world, the differences in their backgrounds seemed less extreme.
The presence of Anton helped, too. He evened things out somehow, maybe because he was having so much fun. Though in station he was superior to Cat, he was anything but stodgy. An amiable sort, Cat decided. And pushed around in his life no less than Cat had been in hers, and Elena in her own. He favored a little choice.
What a spree, he told them, to be free from studying girls arrayed before him as possible fiancées. His parents believed the Tsar had organized the midwinter festival to distract the nation, what with another war with Japan always threatening and the capital city sinking in its own juices. But they had made Anton go along with the campaign anyway. The Tsar is the Tsar.
Cat described her own parents, how they flitted from Scottish golf courses to New Orleans riverboats, all the playgrounds of the rich and bored. Anton wanted to know if Cat missed them at all. The girl answered, “No,” with such acerbity that both Anton and Elena wondered if she was telling the truth.
As for Elena, this campaign seemed another prison. Less dank and lonely than the former, but still she was trapped in this venture, which shifted her further away from her real ambition. Which was no more complicated than to try to find a cup of milk for her sick mother.
Increasingly, Elena suspected that her mother must be safely dead and out of pain by now. She couldn’t have lasted this long. Elena felt cold and safe in this belief. It was better than having to picture Natasha Rudina still suffering while all three of her children had seemed to forsake her. However, a failing body will choose its own time to give up the ghost. Today could be Natasha Rudina’s last day, last breath, right now; or tomorrow. Would her ghost pass, to say good-bye to Elena?
Sorrow is so often invisible. Elena fell silent while Cat and Anton laughed. Perhaps the bonhomie of that pair offended their hostess. “We’ve gotten somewhere,” muttered Baba Yaga with the sour wisdom of her thousand years. “The end of the line maybe.”
They pushed to see. The light had strengthened by degrees; the sky was the color of cabbage soup. An orb swam behind hanks of obscuring clouds. It was too bright to be the moon, but how unearthly, a cerulean sun.
A sea curved ahead of them. The Arctic Ocean, if Myandash had been telling the truth about where they were. Its horizon was vaporous, indistinct. Near the shore drifted a fantastic city of glacial cathedrals, warships, minarets and caves, small mountains.
“How perfect,” cried Cat. “They look soft as cloth. Or as if giant heated knives have smoothed out imperfections. Like carvings in ice at fancy parties.”
“Probably sun and wind have done the work,” said Anton. “Look, do you see that one with the series of bridges? A boat could sail underneath.”
“It’s like the Tsar’s pavilions, except with bears rather than people,” said Cat, pointing. Sure enough, on one floating island, a party of white bears was nosing about.
It’s too far, it’s too strange, thought Elena. I know black hens, not white bears. I want to go home. Mamenka, if you die, don’t fail to say good-bye. I may not recognize a spirit in the blown snow, passing by me, but bless me one final time.
Baba Yaga: “At this time of year, the ice isn’t supposed to calve. It’s irresponsible, breaking up like this. Forcing polar bears to go visiting their relatives whether they want to or not. This is what Myandash was talking about. Let’s go investigate.”
She threw open the wardrobe door and hauled out over her head a supply of great fur coats. The children husked themselves in pelts and stoles, and fell off the porch of Dumb Doma into the snow.
“You know the rules. Don’t let anyone in, Mewster,” said the witch.
“You and your rules,” said the kitten, with admirable East Asian detachment.
With the owl leading, they hurried. It would quickly become too cold, and they would have to go back. To the east, as far as they could see, the sweep of shoreline was flat. To the west lifted a series of snow-covered hills. Pewter in the pale light, brownish-rose in the shadows.
“Well,” said Baba Yaga, “not much to see here. We might as well go back to Dumb Doma. There’s got to be some clue as to what is going wrong. We’ll move along the shore and look for it.”
But when they got back to Dumb Doma, the door wouldn’t open. “Darn, where’s my house key?” The witch checked all the pockets of her fur coat.
“I don’t think the door’s locked,” said Anton. “It’s frozen.”
“Yes, but my key is made of lightning.” Still, whether Baba Yaga spoke in hyperbole or fact, no key could be found. If Mewster heard them pounding on the door, he showed no sign of it, and kept dozing. They could see him snoring as the window continued icing over. “Traitor. Ingrate. Wake up or I’ll tear those claws out of your paws! I’ll take you to the vet and have you neutered!”
“You told him not to let anyone in,” said Anton.
“A cat and his schemes,” she seethed. “He’s been waiting for this moment.”
“Baba Yaga,” said Cat, “we can’t wait. We need to find other shelter.”
“You’re right. Much more of this, and we’re toast. I mean, frozen toast. Let’s climb this hill and see what’s on the other side. Perhaps some laggard from Myandash’s tribe will provide an extra tent of fur. At any rate, we can take cover in the lee.”
They could think of nothing better to do, so they set out in single file. Anton went first and the girls next. Baba Yaga brought up the rear.
The snowy owl circled the headland of the promontory but wouldn’t come nearer. Nor did it fly away, but rounded in the sky like a sentry.
Near the base of one of the lower mounds, Anton spied a distinction in the coloring of the ice. “There, that shadowy smudge may be a cave. We better take shelter.” For the wind was picking up smartly. Snow blew in muslin curtains.
They tried to hurry. Ice was rimming their eyelids. The steely cold made lateral stabs in their chests as they breathed. The skin inside their nostrils felt prickly and brittle.
It only took them a few moments to reach the opening that Anton had noticed. They scrambled up chunks of broken snow, scattered like rocks at the side of a river canyon. At last, out of the wind. Moreover, the cave was warm.
“Hot springs in the Arctic?” said Baba Yaga. “Elena, don’t dawdle.” The girl was looking at the snow gusts, studying them for character, blessing. Who really knows what the specter of a departing spirit looks like? Mama, Mamenka.
&nb
sp; They could just about stand up straight. The edges of the cave doorway were smoothed, probably by wind. Thin enough in places for a pale porphyritic light to bleed through. It made the snow wall into alabaster.
Soon they warmed up enough to remove their fur coats. They folded them and sat upon them, and looked out the cave at the churning black sea and the expressive formations of ice that passed by. “A teapot,” said Cat, pointing at one.
“Two boots, one atop another,” said Anton, indicating another.
“That one looks like the young Dante, when he was dating widely,” said the witch. “He was lots of fun at a pig roast, believe you me.”
Elena’s mind felt frozen. She said to the witch, “Why should you live for a thousand years when you’re so awful, and a normal mother dies like a rose in winter?” Some despair was rising in her, unbidden. Tears froze on her cheeks. It wasn’t fair. She pulled out the small matryoshka, kissed it with cold lips.
“Don’t you cross me, too,” said Baba Yaga. “I’ve had it up to here with insurrection today. You get what you get in life. Rotten eggs.”
“Don’t fight,” said Cat, who had a sense of the witch’s temper.
“No, I mean the stink in this cave. It’s like rotten eggs,” replied the witch. “Don’t you smell it? Maybe that’s why Myandash’s owl won’t come near.”
Now it had been named, they knew what she meant. There was something strong and organic and perhaps unhappy in the air in the cave. “Maybe,” said Baba Yaga, “we should evacuate this cave before it evacuates us.”
“Why? What do you mean?” asked Cat.
“I mean that I think the cave may be allergic to us. It is shortly going to sneeze us halfway across the North Pole.”
As she spoke, the floor of the cave slithered beneath their feet, and they fell to their knees. “Crawl! Crawl for your lives!” cried the witch, and crawl they did.
The four castaways somersaulted forward. The walls of the entrance, lilac-veined a few moments ago, were now running with dark inky cords, patterns coursing through marble. The two sides of the cave entrance had retracted. The opening was narrower, too, focusing.
They tumbled down the crusty scree. The sections of slope that, upon their approach, had seemed to be a hill of milled flour, smooth and unblemished, were now broken terrain. Tosses of ice like the kind of boulders you see at a harbor’s edge, used as a breakfront against erosion.
“Don’t look back,” yelled Baba Yaga as they slowed down.
Cat and Anton did look back. So did Baba Yaga. They didn’t, therefore, see Elena lose her balance, and then her grip on the matryoshka. The doll dropped out of her hand and went slaloming ahead of her. Before she’d quite righted herself, she lunged after it, afraid it would bury itself in snow and be lost.
A horizontal volcano was erupting above them. Only the trajectory of the explosion kept them from being scorched to mere bones. The sulfurous, flaming material shot over their heads. Most of the rainbow spray of filth landed in open water. Where it slopped upon an ice floe, though, it melted that ice as neatly as acid might dissolve a sugarcane ballerina. Leaving only a lopsided pencil of snow, which tilted over and disappeared into the boiling sea.
They skidded to a halt in several ignoble positions. “First tornados, now volcanoes,” muttered the witch. “What next? And that stench. Aggravated sewage. Fish mousse come down with a serious virus.”
“Are you all right?” asked Cat. “Anyone hurt?”
“I’m not,” said Anton, mopping up blood from his brow, “but Elena might be.”
They craned to see where Anton was pointing. Elena had been thrown upon a broken tableland cantilevering over the sea; her head lolled back across the edge. Two feet more and she’d have been dunked, drowned by now, an instantly frozen corpse.
They couldn’t see her face. But they didn’t like the angle at which she’d been tossed.
Baba Yaga beat the others to Elena’s side, scrambling like a fat furry spider down the tilted plinth of ice. In one scoop she rescued the doll from the water, then tucked it into a pocket of Elena’s borrowed coat.
Cat clambered beside the witch and said, “Let me.” She pulled off her mittens.
Her friend felt warm enough, but her color was pale. Her eyes remained closed and her lips parted. Cat said, “Elena, Elena.” There came no answer.
“We’ve got to get her somewhere warm,” said Anton. “She’ll freeze to death.”
“Don’t look at me,” said Baba Yaga. “It’s she who was supposed to be good with directions.” The snowy owl descended through depths of wind, and landed with its talons upon the shoulder of Elena’s coat. “You’ve come to pay your respects? You anticipate. Go away,” continued the witch. “She’s a member of the League of Freed Prisoners, but she’s not that freed. Not yet.”
Cat said, “You must have some idea.” So the witch tried an all-purpose bromide for emergencies like this.
“Hey diddle diddle, I need a little
Help.”
The ground began to shake. The slope upon which they had fallen shifted, a clockwise motion. Segments of ice floor, broken up like peanut brittle in a skillet, slid this way and that with an angry grinding sound. The witch leaped to avoid a six-ton slab while Cat and Anton hauled Elena to safety.
Safety, for the moment anyway, seemed to be at the level part of the landscape, where the frozen tundra looked as much like a sandy beach as it could manage. Flat, though cruelly windswept. The snow dunes continued to heave, throwing off cladding like roof tiles. The highest brow of the hill contorted in a motion not unlike Mewster having a stretch, the back part hoisting itself first and then the front.
And then — Cat was almost glad that Elena was unconscious — a side of the slope fell like a collapsing rock face. A plate of ice five times the size of the Thunder Stone that serves as a base for the famous statue of Peter the Great. Behind that plate a swelling, possessed of a thick but lively light, its surface an angled black slash swimming in emerald-gold.
The tapered oval blinked at them. “Cor blimey,” muttered Cat, sinking back to school slang she and her classmates used when the proctor was out of the room.
“What is it?” said Anton.
The witch didn’t answer. She stood alert and quivering, not from cold but from the thrill of something unknown. How much of this world could be fresh to a thousand-year-old witch? wondered Cat. What a novelty for her.
“Žmey-Aždaja is awake.” A voice issuing from what was left of the mountain. One of the near ridges was yawning open. The mouth of hell, black and hot. The voice sounded multiple, accompanied by its own echoes. “I am Žmey-Aždaja.” Every word was a labor, produced from a throat some distance away from the mouth. It spent its words frugally.
“Žmey-Aždaja,” said the witch. “You sound like a savory paste, possibly made of aubergines, suitable for spreading on crackers.”
The being did not reply. Perhaps it saw through the lunacy that Baba Yaga so often reeled off to disguise her intentions.
“Would you tell us what you are, Žmey-Aždaja?” Anton’s voice cracked. Hardly an adventurer’s bold challenge, but he spoke bravely through the wobble.
Cat saw the ridge above them lift and settle. The cave in which they’d taken shelter was leaking a tarry spume. It was paired with a second cave on the other side of the ridge. Together they looked like nostrils. The golden bulge high above them was an eye. She knew, then, what the creature would say next. She’d traveled far enough to believe in everything.
“Žmey-Aždaja,” it said. “The dragon of ice.”
Baba Yaga: “So what Myandash said is true. ‘The wakeful fuse …’ ”
“The third figure,” said Anton. “The Fabergé egg showed three creatures: Baba Yaga, and the Firebird, and Žmey-Aždaja.”
“Baba Yaga,” said the ice-dragon, stretching out the name for half a minute, practicing it against the pale iron landscape. “Are you still alive?”
“We have no time to exchan
ge social niceties. We’ve come to bargain,” said the witch. “But Žmey-Aždaja, we will freeze before we start. We need your help.”
“Talk, talk. Voices.” The creature cleared its lungs. A lick of heat pulsed from its nostrils and settled upon them for a moment. Bliss.
“Since you ask,” continued the witch, “I am alive enough for my purposes. But while we’re on the subject of survival, the Firebird hasn’t hatched from his shell. Even the egg has disappeared. With your big eye you might happen to know where it is. The land is dying, Žmey-Aždaja. We’ve come from the Tsar’s court to find out why.”
“I make no answer to humans.”
“That doesn’t cut it with me; I’m human on the outside only, and you know it,” said Baba Yaga. “I speak to you as force to force.”
“You are ten times older than the oldest human ever was, Baba Yaga. I am ten times older than you. I make no bargain.”
“Please,” said Cat, remembering her Happyweather School manners.
“What could we give you to help us?” asked Anton. “We’re just meager human children, not magic at all.” He began going through the pockets of the fur coat.
“Humans give nothing to me.” The creature sounded almost amused, but also irritated. “Humans, bfahhh. A mere pox upon the world. A noisy disease, nothing more than that. Their human complaint hums over the horizon. It gets louder by the season. Let the race die out and the human clamor cease.”
Shadows upon the talcum slopes drew the musculature of the dragon. The hills shifted. It was clear now that they were segments of the sprawled body. Ice-dragon couchant. Baba Yaga, standing by one of its snow-clad paws, looked like a cricket scraping near the paw of a German shepherd.
“Why should humans cease their human noise?” Baba Yaga asked.
Žmey-Aždaja replied, almost as if talking to itself, “During the months of long nights, I like to close my eyes and rest. I am used to sleeping for half a year. Only when the long days of light return do I wake enough to breathe fire and stir the ocean free of pack ice. That is how it goes, for thousands of years.