Beneath Ceaseless Skies #182 Read online

  Nadia flung the plank after it and turned to see half the town staring at her in shock. “Hooray for Nadia Daniilovna,” chirped a small boy, but he was quickly hushed by his father.

  Nadia trudged back to the remnants of Papa’s stall and began gathering her wares. After a moment Aleksandr joined her. Around them the rest of the traders were streaming out of the square, no doubt anxious to be home before the hut made a return visit.

  “You have lost some stock,” Aleksandr observed, as they dumped torn and muddied furs back into the barrow.

  Nadia nodded tiredly. Half of the coats were now ruined. Maybe she could reconstitute them as rugs. She picked up an old birch broom from the wreckage and tried to scrape some of the mud off the pelts.

  “Let me give you some money to help cover the damage.”

  Nadia demurred, but Aleksandr insisted on at least buying the caftan. He then pushed her barrow back up the streets in silence, although his lips moved as if he were rehearsing something to himself. When they reached her house, he coughed deliberately and turned to face her.

  “Nadia, I must tell you that I have been giving some thought to our future.”

  “My future is in fur,” said Nadia, unlocking the door.

  “To be sure! But things are different now, which is why I think we can help each other. You have your father’s expertise, I have respectability. Not that you have anything to be ashamed of, only, you know how the world is.”

  “I do, Sasha. Thank you.”

  “I have been in touch with some trappers upriver at Khotilov, but the Parfeev name is not yet...fully established. If I could approach them with the backing of Daniil Ivanov’s Fine Fur Emporium, then they might be willing to entrust me with their stock.”

  “You? Or us?”

  “We would be partners, of course; and your honored father’s name would come first on the shingle,” Aleksandr explained. “I thought, ‘Ivanov and Parfeev: Pelts of Distinction’.”

  “What about Danillovna and Parfeev?” asked Nadia tartly.

  Aleksandr laughed nervously. “You will think on the offer?” he asked.

  “Very hard,” Nadia assured him, and closed the door. It had taken Papa twenty years to build up the Ivanov name; she wasn’t going to let Aleksandr borrow it, however charitable his intentions might be.

  Yet her own prospects seemed little better. She spent the afternoon sitting by the stove with a quill in her hand and Papa’s accounts book on her knee. Hearth taxes. Stall repair. Fresh skins and transport. The numbers multiplied maliciously beneath her pen.

  She doodled Aleksandr’s honest and open face in the income column. Had she been too hasty? It would cost her nothing to offer a name, and Aleksandr would be the one bearing all the risks of the journey.

  She drew him again in expenditure, a cruel, slack-jawed caricature. Once it was known that they were partners, how long until Ivanov’s Fine Fur Emporium became Aleksandr’s business in the eyes of the town, and she a mere stall-holder?

  For now, she needed to assess the damage from the hut’s rampage at the market, see what she could salvage. Let them see her with her head held high at next week’s market. Show them what Daniil Ivanov’s daughter was made of.

  She scattered sawdust on the damaged furs to absorb the dirt, then started beating them clean with the silver birch broom. It was tiring work, and she went out to the well for a drink after half an hour. When she came back, the broom was floating in the air, still beating furs on its own.

  Nadia slumped into her chair and watched the broom carry out its duties. It must have fallen from the witch’s hut at the market. That meant that sooner or later Grandmother Yaga would be back to look for it, and an angry witch was the last thing she needed right now.

  The broom swept the last of the sawdust out the door and, its business complete, dropped to the planking with a clatter.

  People always said that Grandmother Yaga was a fair trader, in her way. Maybe in return for her broom she would offer some compensation for Nadia’s lost furs. Business was business, surely, even for witches.

  * * *

  The hut had left town, but it didn’t take long to pick up its trail. The guard at the wolf gate pointed wordlessly towards the woods, and just off the road oversized chicken tracks broke the crust of yesterday’s snow. Each arrow-like print was as long as Nadia’s arm.

  Leaving the woodsmoke and churchbells behind her, Nadia followed the tracks into the mottled spines of the birch forest with the broom tucked under her arm. Broken branches littered the trail, evidence of the hut’s passing. It must be nearby; nothing that large could have pushed very deeply into these trees.

  She heard the hut before she saw it. The crunch of snow, the clatter of sticks. Mustering her courage, Nadia strode through the thinning trees and came out into a sunlit clearing.

  The hut was tilted backwards, so that its rear edge rested against the snow. This was apparently to free up its feet, as in one claw it delicately held a thin branch which it was trying to jam upright into the ground. A lopsided line of similar branches, some already fallen prone, marked a semicircle around the clearing.

  “Hello, hut,” said Nadia, extending the broom as a peace offering.

  The hut started and dropped its branch. It shuffled aimlessly back and forth for a few steps, then tilted its facade aloofly upwards.

  Silence descended on the clearing. Nadia hadn’t bargained on the house having hurt feelings. Before she could think of a diplomatic way to get it to open its door, the hut jerked out a leg and kicked something hard and white through the slush towards her. Nadia bent forward and picked up a hare’s skull, picked clean by scavengers.

  Not wanting to offend, she lifted the little skull with both hands. Balancing shakily, the hut extended a talon and pointed at the line of sticks, and Nadia realized what it was asking. She jammed the skull onto the firmest post, tilting it so that its empty sockets stared up at the grey sky. The chicken-hut bent forward, bringing its doorway close to the grisly totem, then straightened again and creaked its eaves.

  “I’m sorry if we both lost our temper yesterday. I didn’t want you to get in trouble for losing Grandmother Yaga’s broom. Is she in?” She stood on tip-toe to reach for the door handle, but the hut twisted away before she could grab it, leaving her facing the tightly-packed logs of the side wall.

  Nadia didn’t approve of sulking. She followed the wall around the corner, catching a glimpse of the doorway, but the hut rotated to follow her movement. Nadia paced an entire circuit of the clearing like this, the doorway always just out of reach, until she had caught up with her own footprints again.

  “Stop behaving like a child,” she said. This time she broke into a jog, watching the chicken feet scramble to keep up. Once the house had some momentum going, Nadia turned on her heel and sprinted back the way she had come. The hut hopped into reverse with surprising deftness, and just as Nadia reached the doorway it fell away again. Reckless with exasperation, Nadia dove between the hut’s legs and burst out beneath the opposite wall. With a crescendo of creaks, the hut leapt into the air and twisted itself around a full half-circle before landing.

  “Enough!” shouted Nadia. “Turn and face me, or you’ll feel my stick!”

  Cowed, the house crouched. With a groan of rusty hinges, the door swung open.

  Nadia saw no fire burning inside, but the snow’s reflected sunlight spilled into the doorway and cast a grey light across pine boards, soot-stained walls hung with animal skins, and an iron cauldron on the central stove. And there, hunched over the cauldron, was a seemingly headless figure, clad in furs.

  “Grandmother?” asked Nadia, stomach twisting. “Grandmother, I’ve brought your broom back.”

  The figure didn’t stir, and Nadia hesitated out in the sunshine.

  “Grandmother?”

  Mouth dry with nerves, Nadia put a knee up to the sill and hauled herself into the doorframe. She let her eyes adjust, taking in a petrified thorn bush in the corner that wa
s usually given over to an icon, a vast mortar and pestle against the wall, and the fur-clad figure in the centre of the room. It was slumped over the cauldron, head immersed in the liquid.

  The hut listed nervously; it was like being on a river-barge. “Gently,” murmured Nadia, stroking the splintery wall, and she crept into the centre of the small room. The cauldron was almost full, and despite the hut’s recent acrobatics the surface still glistened with congealed fat. Grandmother Yaga’s head was immersed in this soup, her wattled neck like a branch frozen into the winter-ice.

  Nadia took a handful of brittle hair and, when the body didn’t stir, she hauled it up out of the broth.

  The stink of decay burst into the frigid air. A squashed and bloated mush, too far gone to resemble a face, emerged dripping from the liquid. Nadia let the body slide down to the floor. The cold had preserved the witch well, and beneath a tattered bear-hide Nadia could see pendulous breasts and bony legs. But there were no claws, no talons. She was just an old woman, dead a long time.

  Nadia sat on the sagging mattress, the broom falling to the floor. “Oh hut,” she said. “I’m so sorry. Now we are both alone.”

  The chimney gave a mournful whistle.

  It seemed rude to leave, but Nadia didn’t know what to do. She stared at the old woman coiled on the floor. She knew she should go, but she couldn’t leave the hut with a corpse inside it. It would be like having a dead mouse caught in your throat. Not even witches and their huts deserved that.

  Nadia wrapped her scarf around her nose and mouth and bent forward to grab the dead witch’s shoulders. In a series of rasping tugs, she dragged the corpse towards the sunlight, but before she could reach it the door slammed shut and plunged the room into darkness.

  “We have to take her outside to bury her,” said Nadia. “You have to let go.”

  A minute passed, and just as Nadia was starting to lose her composure the door reluctantly creaked open again. The chicken-hut tilted its frame forward, so Nadia was able to slither the corpse out onto the snow. In the sunlight, the body looked shrunken and pale.

  Now she had another problem. Beneath the snow the soil was frozen, and Nadia had no way to thaw it. She thought about guiding the hut back into town, taking the body to the churchyard, but she somehow doubted that the priests would accept it.

  Then there was a clatter within the hut’s walls and then, sailing out in stately procession, came the mortar, the pestle, and the broom she had returned.

  The pestle dragged its base through the snow, tracing a circle six-feet wide. The broom then set to work whisking white clumps out of the boundary. Once the hard-packed soil had been revealed, the mortar tipped to allow the pestle to lever the witch’s limp body into its basin. The mortar ground its way into the circle’s centre and deposited the body there before returning to settle by the hut. The broom neatly swept away its tracks and then fell to the ground beside it.

  This display so captivated Nadia that for a while she did not realize that she was being joined by others. Like ghosts, the creatures of the woods slipped through the trees and took up positions in a ring around the corpse. Crows shared the bare branches with squirrels. Martens and foxes sat alongside a snow-frosted bear. Nadia quailed as a pair of wolves emerged, but they paid her no mind, settling themselves down amidst a family of beavers without a snarl. Within five minutes, a whole forest family had assembled, breathing in soft unison, while the hut stood above them all like a gangly youth, awkward in his height.

  Nadia drew her cloak tighter around her, and looked about nervously. “I suppose I should say a few words, being the only person who can speak. You... don’t speak, do you?”

  The animals were silent.

  “Well, then...

  “I didn’t know Grandmother Yaga, but I know what you must be feeling. It’s very hard when the person you rely on is taken away from you. And after they’re gone, everyone just seems to expect that you’ll go away too, but you have to keep going somehow. Even if the person who should be most proud of you isn’t around to see it.”

  Her voice caught, and she had to swallow back the tightness in her throat before she could go on.

  “I don’t know if all the stories about her were true, and if she really ate children, then... she shouldn’t have. But I know Grandmother Yaga never had to worry about creditors. She lived a long time, she did what she wanted and she went where she wanted, and that seems like a good life to me. Wherever she is now, she should be proud.”

  Nadia paused to wipe a knuckle across her eyes. “I’m sorry for your loss,” she finished, lamely.

  The hut lifted a yellow claw and lowered it slowly until its talons closed around the little body. Nadia watched in respectful silence. For a minute all was stillness, then the hut released its grasp and took two paces backwards.

  And the animals went to work.

  Nadia had never seen dismemberment, but she felt no revulsion. In the circumstances, she couldn’t think of anything more fitting. The wolves took turns tearing at the torso, the bear solemnly pulled off an arm, birds pecked away the face. Finally, the squirrels lapped up the bloodstained snow, and then there was nothing.

  The service was over. As each animal left, it touched its muzzle to the hut’s legs. Some approached Nadia too – she nervously endured a pawing from the bear before it left the clearing. Rubles of fur, Nadia thought regretfully, watching it go.

  When they were all gone, the hut bent its knees and swung open its door with a creak. The invitation was clear, but Nadia shook her head. “No, I have to go home, to my business,” she said. The hut bobbed and then abruptly strode off into the trees.

  A fresh wave of loneliness hit Nadia as the sound of cracking branches faded into the distance. And after all that, she hadn’t even managed to return the broom – it lay with the other tools on the snow. It seemed she couldn’t even give things away this week. Maybe she could find a use for the witch’s tools left behind. She gathered up the broom and the pestle, which seemed surprisingly light for its size, and then experimentally tapped the edge of the mortar.

  “Rise,” she said.

  The mortar rose an inch into the air. To Nadia’s satisfaction, when she began to retrace her footprints it hovered along behind her.

  Returning through the wolf gate, Nadia wrapped her arms around the mortar and feigned carrying it through the streets of town. As she approached her house at dusk, she saw Bogdana Osorgina’s son bouncing a ball in the road. Before she could call a greeting, his mother emerged from her doorway and grabbed him by the shirt.

  “Stay away from that half-woman’s door! Don’t you know that Nadia Daniilovna will eat you up if you enter her house, just like she ate her father?”

  The child laughed and skipped back to his house. Bogdana Osorgina met Nadia’s eyes, frowned, and hurried in after him. Her shutters closed with a bang.

  “She thinks I’m a witch,” Nadia said wonderingly to her magic mortar. “And so what if I was? To think that I would harm dear Papa. How dare she!”

  The mortar sounded a ringing note, like a glass being struck, and Nadia hastily dumped it by the hat-rack. Suddenly ashamed of her wild afternoon, she covered the tools with a blanket and lit the lamps.

  Night crept over the town. Nadia clicked her abacus and puzzled over her father’s accounts and thought of the night wind blowing through the trees. She wondered where the hut was going, and if it would find shelter for the night. Or were its walls shelter enough?

  Her reverie was interrupted by a rap at the door. She opened it to find Aleksandr stamping his boots outside. “Nadia,” he said, “May I come in?”

  “Of course, Sasha,” Nadia said, stepping aside. Aleksandr hung his felt hat on the nail, hesitated before her, and then ducked his head to brush his lips against her calloused fingers.

  “Have you considered my suggestion?” he asked as he straightened.

  “I have,” said Nadia, tucking her hands into her skirts. “And I am flattered, but I must refuse.�
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  To her surprise, Aleksandr grabbed her shoulders and looked her straight in the eye. His breath smelled of vodka. “And you are right to do so! It was an insulting offer. Let me say what is truly in my heart – I want us to be married.”

  “Married?” she echoed, sliding out of his grasp.

  “I know how lost you must be feeling without Daniil Ivanov’s guidance,” he continued, swaying slightly.

  “Sasha...”

  “...a woman should not live alone...”

  “Sasha...”

  “...all we could achieve together...”

  “Sasha!”

  He paused, blinking at her.

  “Sasha. You know that even if we were married, I wouldn’t be one of those wax statues you see adorning their husbands at church. I intend to carry on as I have been.”

  “Naturally... naturally. You would retain your place at the stall, but we must be sensible, Nadia. A furri... a furrer... a person in our field must travel to meet with the trappers, and the roads are not safe for a woman. Brigands will not care about your family name.”

  Nadia looked into his earnest face, her fingers twitching over imaginary abacus beads. With access to the whole of Aleksandr’s savings, they could keep afloat for a year. Long enough to establish her own reputation and win back Papa’s customers. But as a stall-holder? As a Parfeev? Papa’s ironic eyebrows loomed in her mind.

  “I...” she hesitated.

  Emboldened, Aleksandr grasped her hand. “Let me take the burden from your shoulders.” he murmured. “It’s what Daniil Ivanov would have wanted.”

  She snatched her hand back. “You don’t know anything about what he would have wanted!”

  Aleksandr closed his eyes and wiped a wrist across his sweating forehead. “I don’t understand, Nadia, I would be very good to you.”

  “I know you would, Aleksandr,” she said. “But it’s not the life I want.”