The witch tried to drive a bargain. “A fat lot of good they’re doing you outside your mouth. Once a tooth escapes its prison, it’s a free agent. Anyway, we need these. I know, I want, I want. But we’ll pay you for them. Set your price. We’ll talk.”
Žmey-Aždaja scraped its head along the shore, but made no effort to bite them. It was still frozen in place against the coastline. “Dragon teeth are tools of danger,” it warned them.
“In my experience, dead teeth don’t bite.” Baba Yaga hoisted the curved tines in her arms and beckoned Cat and Anton to join her. They could manage only two at a time. Huffing and weaving with the effort, they hauled their salvage over to where Dumb Doma was trapped, shivering and coming as near to knocking its knees together as it could, considering it had no knees.
“Whoever plants dragon teeth on a night of a full moon reaps trouble,” snorted Žmey-Aždaja. A moon began to shoulder up over a forlorn section of the horizon. At first glance, this moon looked just about full. Naturally.
“What is the moon but the egg of the world,” said Baba Yaga. “An awfully long gestation period, but when it hatches, alert the wire services. Žmey-Aždaja, you don’t scare me. Finders keepers, losers weepers. Lost teeth are the bones of history. Simmer down, you’re distracting us. We may not be able to persuade you to settle your grievance with the human race, but don’t stop us from trying to save this specimen child.”
Anton said, “I remember about dragon teeth from our classics professor in Rome. Jason and the Argonauts. In ancient Greek myth, Jason planted the teeth of a dragon, and they sprouted into an army of warriors.”
“Any relation?” Baba Yaga asked the ice-dragon.
The creature lowered its lids halfway — its expression reminded Cat of Mewster in hunting form. That focused, abstracted look before a pounce …
“I don’t believe in that farrago,” said the witch. “A dragon-tooth army? Sounds like a public relations campaign to keep poachers at bay. The sun is setting, the wind is picking up. I think your teeth are past regeneration, frankly, but we’ll have to take our chances.”
The ice-dragon’s rage made small avalanches powder the air; it spewed another noxious fireball into the sea.
“Honeybucket, you need some other hobby than chewing up the shore and melting the ice cap. We have your best interest at heart. But first things first. We have to save this child.”
“We have to save her?” asked Cat. I suppose she looked shocked at the witch’s apparent tenderness.
“I meant to say we’re going to save her. Since I know she’s your friend, blah blah blah. After all, Elena’s the one who got us into this mess, what with her doll compass. We might need her to guide us homeward.” They lifted the first dragon’s tooth. It might have been mistaken for the rib of a whale. The pointed end drove into the snow neatly, stabilized at about the halfway point. Baba Yaga added, “Elena stood up to me, and without taming me with a house gift. Few children manage that.”
“Tribute is your custom?” said the ice-dragon, in sulfurous smolder. “Yet I get no gift. Who steals my bones should submit a tithe.”
“You know,” said Baba Yaga, “dragon voices are as vexing as human ones. Cat, Anton, why don’t you recite verses from the Georgics, or sing some barrelhouse blues, anything to drown out our ungracious host?”
She had only been dashing off a mean remark. Nonetheless, Anton and Cat looked at each other.
Cat said, “Baba Yaga, maybe Žmey-Aždaja needs a lullaby. Something to distract it from the sound of human suffering and greed, and lull it to sleep. It wants a token of our thanks for its teeth. What about the Fabergé egg?”
The witch propped her elbow on the top of a planted tooth. She scratched her chin. “You gave it to me, then I gave it to the Tsar. Then Anton stole it and gave it back to me. Now you want me to regift it? Whatever for?”
“When it’s wound up, it plays a lullaby. Didn’t you know that?”
“A music-box melody will last about a minute, tops.”
Cat clapped her hands, to warm them. “Maybe Žmey-Aždaja can rewind it?”
Baba Yaga said, “Dragons aren’t known for their small-muscle coordination. Let the ice-dragon hum to itself if it wants to drown out sorrow. We better get this breakfront done before the night winds come, or we’ll all be ice-dragons by the morning.”
Still, Cat thought about it as she worked. On long weekends when other girls went home to be with their families and she alone was left in the dormitory, she’d have given anything for someone to sing her a lullaby. Anything.
Anton, for his part, was thinking things he didn’t say because of the ice-dragon’s keen hearing. What if they used the ice-dragon’s own teeth to kill him? Could they stab him to death? Bite him with his own teeth? Žmey-Aždaja couldn’t escape; he was frozen in place. If he was dead, he wouldn’t be chewing the shoreline, melting the ice, flooding the world, changing the seasons.
Baba Yaga knew how boys thought. She looked at Anton slantwise. “Don’t even think about it. Even a worrywart ice-dragon has a place in the world. If Žmey-Aždaja didn’t wake up every springtime, what would happen to our summers?”
“Human voices,” said the creature dully. He heard but he didn’t understand.
So they fell silent, each thinking private thoughts. They worked without ceasing, dragging every tooth they could find over to the hut. There weren’t enough teeth to make a full round of fence. But the teeth made a nice jawline, a semi-circle in the snow a few feet beyond the corner of Dumb Doma.
The last tooth was only half the size of the others. “A baby tooth,” said Baba Yaga, hammering it into place with a certain vengeful glee. Then the witch, Cat, and Anton hurried inside the stockade wall. They couldn’t talk anymore. They lay under the house, close together, all around Elena, all in furs. Even the witch was turning blue-white.
The ice-dragon lapsed into a ruminative silence. The sound of its breathing was like the beginning of every thunderhead that boasts its way around the world.
The night seemed to happen in slow motion and racing speed at the same time. The aurora borealis, mute and indifferent but gorgeous, spanned the heavens like bolts of shimmering green and gold gauze. The sun was gone. The moon was up. As it rose, it became like an iced orange. It bowled along the horizon for a while. Shortly — or many frozen dreams later — it began to sink again, and disappeared beneath the edge of Žmey-Aždaja’s forehead.
When the pale blue sun made a nominal return appearance, the League of Freed Prisoners began to stir. They didn’t even know if they’d slept. Frost-coma and sleep feel much the same. Ice glued their lashes shut until they rubbed it away.
A windless dawn, a soundless earth. Baba Yaga sat up, the breakfront behind her, and watched the morning light play upon the devastated shoreline, the ice-dragon’s articulated forehead. Then she knelt up. “Are you awake?” asked the witch, rubbing the shoulder of Elena, kicking gently at Cat and Anton.
“Yes,” answered the soldiers.
Cat sat up at once. Anton raised himself on an elbow and turned. The witch knelt at the edge of her coat with her knuckles on the ground, an elegant chimpanzee. Elena didn’t stir. Arms crossed upon her breast. A stone maiden on a medieval tomb couldn’t hold more still.
Beyond her, the teeth were gone, replaced by an army of soldiers. In the dim light they appeared at first like a hedge of fir trees grown together, their shoulders and the skirts of their broad coats covered in windswept snow.
Baba Yaga whistled. “Well, how do you do?”
“How do we do what?” they replied in unison.
As the light strengthened, they became easier to see. They weren’t snow-covered fir trees. Something more like Bavarian nutcrackers. Though their faces were almost identical, they looked human enough. Not retired army men, these, but seasoned, ready for the next engagement.
Anton was impressed and hoped for battle. To be a soldier!
The regiment wore black caps with sprigs of evergreen
poking from hatbands. Pine-green epaulets, pine-green sashes and belts, and military trousers trim in the Prussian style, fitted snugly in black boots. Brass-buttoned ivory coats flared at the hip.
“I suspect you are just as stuck in the snow as my house is.” But Baba Yaga was wrong. The soldiers kicked up a knee-level blizzard. In a moment they were free and standing at attention, waiting for orders.
Baba Yaga crawled out from beneath Dumb Doma and stood up. Anton and Cat followed, rubbing their creaking limbs and yawning. “How many of you are there?” asked the witch. “Have you multiplied during the night?”
“We don’t know how to multiply,” they said, “nor divide. If you ask us to split up, we can’t. We are an army. We are the army of Žmey-Aždaja.”
“I’m not,” came a new voice. The soldiers didn’t turn at the sound, but the witch and her two young companions did.
At the end of the row was a boy. He was dressed just as his compatriots, except his clothes were sized to suit his stature. “I’m not a soldier yet. I am the dragon-tooth boy,” he said.
“Aha,” said the witch. “That short one.”
He looked younger than the others. In human childhood years, he might be about ten. He didn’t seem to have a remark to make about why he was different.
“Trust me,” said Baba Yaga. “Regimentation is not for everyone. If you want to avoid the military life, you came out in the nick of time. We’ll call you Nikolai Žmey-Aždajavich.”
“He is not one of us,” said the army.
“Not yet,” said the dragon-tooth boy.
“Not ever,” they replied. “You will not grow any bigger. Milk teeth don’t.”
The boy blinked. “I object. I am intended for military service.”
“You speak independently,” said Cat, to change the subject.
Baba Yaga said, “Everyone else is talking lockstep, and Nick has got a private voice. So that’s something to be said for youth, I guess.”
“We are the army of Žmey-Aždaja,” insisted the soldiers. “We put ourselves at your command.” It was like hearing a great wind speaking aloud. A single voice with many strands of personality in it. There must be two hundred of them, thought Cat.
“First things first,” replied the witch. “Help us free this house from the snow, so we can get inside and warm up this frozen girl of ours, assuming she’s in a condition where it’s better to be warm than frozen. By the look of her, I’m not sure.”
“Wait, witch,” said Žmey-Aždaja. The ice-dragon hadn’t slept, of course. Fretting, it had chewed more ice at the edge of the harbor. Then it had begun to work at the ice casing upon one of its forearms. Its anger at the appropriation of its infantry was getting the better of it. Its crenellated crest, engorged nearly obsidian, marked its backbone, like a parade of awkward tombstones on the brow of a hill. “My army is stolen from me. Take it under your leadership only at your peril.” At this, a front claw suddenly shook loose, and four curved talons unsheathed in such a flash of light, they seemed to appear out of nowhere. The sound was like the clanging together of bronze shields. The talons, down-arching sickles, plunged in unison into the ice and gripped it into wedges the size of stallions.
“I’m not sure if this is the right time for a lullaby,” said Cat. “But maybe?”
“Time is against us,” said Baba Yaga. “If you’re right, we need that Fabergé egg in Dumb Doma. I doubt a lullaby will work, though ‘music hath charms to soothe a savage breast, to soften rocks, or bend a knotted oak,’ according to Congreve, who couldn’t carry a tune to save his life. We always made him turn the pages of the sheet music on choir night.”
The witch’s digression had no effect upon the ice-dragon. It wrenched its wrist laterally, releasing a pummel of snow boulders.
Baba Yaga said to Cat and Anton, “Are you paying attention? Charm it somehow, before it’s too late. We’ll start on the house. Men, move out.” She gestured in the direction of the army, which marched after her to the base of Dumb Doma. Soon a screen of flying snow all but hid the house from view as the army set to freeing the pair of chicken legs.
Cat and Anton put their heads together. They knew no common lullabies in English, French, Russian, or Italian. The only song they could come up with was one that Cat’s friends at school sometimes sang on their precision march through Kensington Gardens.
“She’s only a bird in a gilded cage,
A beautiful sight to see,
You may think she’s happy and free from care,
She’s not, though she seems to be,
’Tis sad when you think of her wasted life,
For youth cannot mate with age,
And her beauty was sold,
For an old man’s gold.
She’s a bird in a gilded cage.”
“Whoever she is, she needs to join the League of Freed Prisoners,” called Baba Yaga. “At the rate we’re going, Dumb Doma will be eligible to join soon, too.”
Žmey-Aždaja had gone still. Its talons gleamed like hoops of nickel, but they didn’t scrape. Its one visible eye was fixed upon them piercingly.
“Don’t stop now. Verse two,” suggested Baba Yaga.
“I don’t know one,” said Cat.
“I’ll improvise.” To divert attention from the army at its civil engineering assignment, she began to invent a verse of her own.
“I’m only a witch living all alone,
A miserable sight to see.
You may think I’m scary, thus free from care,
And I’m not, though I’d like to be.
I don’t have a child to boss around,
A young one to call my own.
Since they think, ‘It’s transparent
She’d stink as a parent,’
I’m a witch living all alone.”
By the time Baba Yaga was done, Dumb Doma had been freed, and it was beginning to scratch at the snow as if looking for grubs. It stepped away from the form of Elena — corpse or Sleeping Beauty, no one yet knew. Marbled in morning light.
Still, the door of Dumb Doma remained frozen shut, and the windows opaque with their icy shutters. Baba Yaga ordered the house to stand still so she could pull and push at the latch. She grunted, tugged. She couldn’t budge it an inch.
“More music,” said the ice-dragon, “or my army turns against you.”
The army stood at attention, awaiting the superior command, whomever it came from.
“Do I have to do everything?” panted Baba Yaga. “I’ve nearly got this door. Somebody else make up a verse.”
Cat couldn’t make up words on the spot, nor Anton, of course; he was a prince. So they were surprised when the dragon-tooth boy took a shot at it.
“I’m only a boy born a dragon’s tooth
In the nick of time, sad, but true.
No father or mother, just two hundred brothers
All telling me what to do.
I want to belong to the two hundred strong,
Yet here is the dismal truth:
I’ll never get older
Or grow up a soldier,
I’m a boy born a dragon’s tooth.”
Well, thought Cat, watching the ice-dragon react. Here’s one for the record books. Mother and Pater never paid attention to what I might need. And here, a legitimate monster bothers to notice the needs of its offspring.
For a tear the size of a hot-air balloon, a bath of hot bile, was falling from the ice-dragon’s visible eye. Wet fireworks. When the tear struck, ice melt flowed seaward in great spreading sheets.
“Congreve had his finger on something,” murmured the witch. “Never underestimate the power of cheap music, as he used to remind his wife, a lion-tamer in the local circus.” The ice-dragon didn’t mean to be useful, but emotion is involuntary. A convulsive warm front gushed toward the group. Summertime breezes off the Caspian Sea.
Elena rubbed her eyes. Be born. Be light.
The snowy owl, who had disappeared overnight, stood again on her shoulder. Elena t
ried to sit up but couldn’t manage.
Cat fell upon her friend. Where her tears trickled across Elena’s cheeks, they drew tracks of pink in the light frost. “Oh, so you haven’t … ! I was so afraid you had left us.”
Elena was too exhausted to speak, but the ice at the corners of her mouth crinkled. She looked around. She didn’t know about Žmey-Aždaja or the army of dragon’s teeth. The dragon-tooth boy, a surprise, too. Truly, this world was just as mysterious as the crown of stars from which she had emerged.
The ice-dragon, lying there in a long heap, foothills to headland. It made her think of the world in curtains, a bed-nook world she used to imagine existed. And it did.
Mewster must be becoming a teenage cat. He’s rebelling against authority. He’s barred the door. I’m working on this lock.” Baba Yaga sounded nonchalant, bored, as if she didn’t want Elena to notice her relief. “Dumb Doma got frozen over. We had a little problem getting inside. No biggie. Thanks to these soldiers standing against the windchill, you made it through the night.”
“Have you tried the trapdoor?” Elena replied.
“You and your sense of direction. What trapdoor?”
Elena cleared her throat to build strength for a longer statement. “Lying on the ground while you were all singing, I stared up at the underside of your house. I could see your cellar door. It looks as if it might open easily enough.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about. A house on legs can’t have a cellar.”
Elena said, “Oh. I thought you might use trapdoors to come and go at a moment’s notice.”
“I never would. Cheap stage tricks. House, come here.”
The house was high-stepping with a certain joie de vivre. Soon enough, however, it obeyed.
The witch explored its undercarriage. “Well, well. My little Dumb Doma has been remodeling again.” She thumped on the trapdoor. It swung open. A small ladder unfolded to the ground. From the shadowy top step, Mewster peered down.