Page 47 of Spinning Silver
She brightened up all throughout her body, as if someone had lit a flame inside her. She ran back to her mother and said, “Mama, Mama, I have a name! I have a name! Can I tell you?” and Flek knelt and pulled her into her arms and kissed her and said, “Sleep with it in your heart alone tonight, little snowflake, and tell me in the morning.”
It made me glad looking on their joy: I felt in that moment that Ihadgiven fair return, even for that day and night of terror they had all lived with me, and if I never saw them again, I still hoped that they’d do well for themselves. I did feel a pang of guilt, because I didn’t know exactly what would happen if my plan succeeded and I left their king’s throne vacant for someone else to claim. Would that mean my own rank had fallen, and theirs with mine? But I hoped that would only put them in some lower rank of nobility at worst. I had to take the chance, anyway, for the sake of my own people, being buried alive under that endless snow outside my window.
I took a deep breath. “I’m ready to go,” I said, and almost instantly the glass wall parted and my husband came in: my husband, whom I meant to murder. For just cause and more, but still I felt a little queasy, and I didn’t look him in his face. I’d avoided looking at him before because he’d seemed so terrible and strange, a glittering of icicles brought to life; now I avoided it because he looked suddenly too much likesomeone,like a person. I had held the hand of that frozen little ice-statue of a girl, and she was my goddaughter now or something close to it, and when I looked at Flek and Tsop and Shofer, their faces were warmed by the reflection off the gold in the chests at their feet, and they were the faces of my friends, my friends who had helped me, and would help me again if they could. What did it matter that they didn’tspeakof kindness, here; they haddoneme a kindness with their hands. I knew which one of those I would choose.
But they made it suddenly harder to see only winter inhisface. He wasn’t my friend; he was all monstrous sharp edges of ice, wanting to cut me open and spill gold out of me while he swallowed up my world. But he was a satisfied monster for the moment: Ihadcut myself open, and I’d filled him two storerooms of gold, and he had tomatchmy accomplishment to fulfill his own sense of dignity, so he came to me dressed in splendor equal to my own, as if he meant to do courtesy to the occasion, and he bowed to me as courtly as if I reallywashis queen. “Come, then, my lady, and let us to the wedding,” he said, even suddenly polite to me, now when I most wanted him to be cold and grudging and resentful. I suppose I shouldn’t have been surprised: he’d never given me anything I wanted unless I’d bound him to it beforehand.
I looked at my friends one last time and inclined my head to them, saying farewell, and walked out beside him. We went down together to the courtyard. The sleigh was waiting, heaped with white furs without a mark. My dress and my crown were so heavy on me that I reached for the sides to haul myself up into it, but before I could, he took me by the waist and lifted me without effort inside before taking his own seat next to me.
The deer leapt away at the twitch of the driver’s reins, and the mountain went flashing away around us. The wind was strong and sweet in my face, not too cold, as we rushed down the passage to the silver gates and back out into the world, the sleigh runners whispering over the road and the hooves of the deer a light drumming. It was only a few minutes before we were running quick towards the forest. The deer and the sleigh flew over the top of the new-fallen snow without leaving more than light tracks, and the half-buried trees looked oddly small as we drove through them.
I watched to see what the Staryk would do, what spell or incantation he’d use to open a path to the sunlit world, but all he did was turn and look back at me in very nearly the same speculating way, as if he was wondering whetherImight not fling out some unexpected magic. And then he said to me abruptly, “I will answer no questions for you tonight.”
“What?” My voice nearly cracked with alarm; for an instant I thought he’dguessed,he knew what I’d planned and we weren’t going to any wedding but to my execution. Then I understood what hereallymeant. “We have a bargain!”
“In exchange for your rights only. You have given me nothing in exchange formine.I set no value upon them, and now see I bargained falsely—” He cut himself off abruptly, turning to face forward, and then he said slowly, “Is that why you demanded answers to fool’s questions as your return? To show your disdain for my insult?” He sat there for a moment of silence, and before I could correct him, suddenly he laughed, like a chorus full of bells singing a long way over snow, a baffling noise; I’d never even imagined him laughing. I stopped open-mouthed, half startled and half outraged, and then he turned and seized my hand and kissed it, the brush of his lips against my skin something like breathing out onto frostbitten glass.
He took me so much by surprise that I didn’t say anything at first, or even pull my hand free, and then he said to me fiercely, “I will make you amends tonight, my lady, and show you that I have learned better how to value you; I will not require another lesson beyond this one,” with a wave of his arm out of the sleigh, over the wide landscape smothered in the snow.
At first I looked in confusion, wondering what he meant, but there was nothing around us, nothing to be seen, except his depthless winter. A hundred years of winter that had somehow come all at once on a summer’s day, when the Staryk should have been shut up behind the glass walls of their mountain, waiting for the winter to come again. Though the Staryk had never before been able to hold back the spring so long.
A hundred years of winter, on a summer’s day. I said through a throat suddenly choked and tight, “Youdidn’t make this winter.”
“No, my lady,” he said, still looking at me with all the vast self-congratulation of a man who’d found a treasure hidden in a dirty trough. A treasure of gold, like the Staryk ever coveted; and when they’d begun to raid us more, when they’d begun to come for that gold more often—that was when the winters had begun to grow steadily worse. And now—and now—there were two vast storerooms heaped with shining, sunlit gold; the warmth of the summer sun trapped into cold metal for the Staryk to hoard deep inside his walls, while he buried my home under a wall of winter.
Hesmiledat me, still holding my hand; he smiled at me, and then turned to the driver and said, “Go!” and with a lurch we were onto the white road; the king’s road, Shofer had called it; the Staryk road I had known and glimpsed in the dark woods all my life. It was running on ahead of us as if it had always been there, and stretched away behind us too, as far as I could see, an endless vaulted passageway. The strange unearthly-white trees lined it on both sides, their limbs hung with clear ice-drops and white leaves, and the surface of it was smooth blue-white ice, clouded. The sleigh flew over it, and all at once a sudden strong smell of pine needles and sap came into my nose, a desperate struggling of life. Through the canopy of white branches overhead, the sky began to change: the grey flushed slowly through on one side with blue, and on the other with golden and orange, a summer evening’s sky over winter woods, and I knew that we’d slid out of his kingdom and back into my own world.
He was still holding my hand in his. I left it there deliberately, thinking of Judith singing in her sweet voice to make Holofernes’s eyes go heavy in his tent, and what else she’d endured there first. I could bear this. I was so angry I had gone cold straight through.Lethim think he had me, and could have my heart for the lifting of his finger.Lethim think I would betray my people and my home just to be a queen beside him. He could hold my hand the rest of the way if he wanted to, as a fair return for the gift he’d given me, the one thing I’d wanted from him after all: I’d lost even the slightest qualm about killing him.
Chapter 19
There were a few servants who went to the Jewish quarter sometimes: Galina’s maid Palmira, when her mistress wanted some jewelry, would go and look at their stalls. She had been too high to talk to me before with anything but impatience, when my lady was the little-wanted daughter of the wife who’d come before; all the dance that went on in the great ballrooms and bedrooms, we danced over again among ourselves in our narrow halls. But now I was servant to the tsarina, who valued me enough to have sent for me, so when I went knocking at the duchess’s dressing room, Palmira got up from where she sat polishing jewelry and came and kissed me on both cheeks, and asked me if I wasn’t tired from the journey, and had me sit in her own chair next to the wall that was on the other side of the fireplace in the bedroom; she sent the under-maid to bring a cup of tea. I sat gladly before the warm wall and drank the tea: oh, I was tired.
“The banker?” she said at once, when I told her the name Moshel. “I don’t know where he lives, but the steward will. Ula,” she said to the girl, “go bring us some kruschiki and some cherries, and then go tell Panov Nolius that dear Magreta is here and ask if he won’t join us for a cup of tea: we shouldn’t make her run all over the house after so much traveling.” Another little dancing step there, because she liked to make the steward come toher,which he would not do, except that here I was. And here I was, and the wall was warm at my back, and I was too old to keep dancing anymore. I only sat and drank my tea and took another cup with cherries and ate a sweet crisp melting kruschik and said thank you to Panov Nolius when he did deign to come and sit and have tea with us.
“Panov Moshel lives in the fourth house on Varenka Street,” he said cool and stiff, when I asked him the name. “Does Her Majesty want to arrange a loan? I would be glad to be of service.”
“A loan? The tsarina?” I said, confused; Irina had said a man in the Jewish quarter, and I had thought of those moneylenders in their little stalls who looked through their small round glasses at a silver ring that had come from your mother, and then gave you money for it. A little nothing of money, compared with what it was worth to you, but the little money that you had to have just then, because one of the girls who had sat in that dark room with you, for hours, had snuck out to see one of those soldiers who’d let you out, and now she needed a doctor who wouldn’t come except for silver and in the middle of the night. That was what it meant to me, someone who lent money in the Jewish quarter. That was not someone for a duke or a tsarina to deal with.
Nolius liked that I didn’t know any better; I might be the tsarina’s servant, but I was still a silly old woman who thought the world was made of small things, and he was the trusted steward of the duke. So then he unbent a little and took a kruschik and told me, pleased and full of knowledge, “No, no, Panov Moshel has a bank: a man of solid worth, most reputable. He helped to arrange the loans for the rebuilding of the city wall after the war, with great discretion. His Grace has had him here to the house eight times on business, and all times ordered that he be treated with great respect. And never once has Moshel tried to trade upon it. He comes always on foot, not in a carriage; the women of his family dress soberly, and he keeps a modest house. Never has he asked a favor in return.”
I had always thought of the city wall as something built by soldiers, and not with money, but of course you would have to pay for it somehow; for stones and mortar and food for men to eat and clothes for them to wear while they built it for you, but even if I had imagined it so far, I would have thought only that the money must have come from a strongroom somewhere, a chest full of gold like a duke would have or a tsar. I wouldn’t have thought of it coming from quiet men in plain coats who didn’t ride in carriages.
Nolius leaned in so he could be sure I would understand he was telling me a private thing only a man of his importance would know, and added with much significance, “He has been given to know that if he converted, doors might be opened for him.” Then he sat back and shrugged, opening a hand. “But he did not choose it, and His Grace was satisfied. I have heard him say, ‘I would rather have my affairs in the hands of a man who is content than a man who is hungry. I prefer to take my risks on the battlefield.’ I would certainly recommend him if Her Majesty desired to make any financial arrangements.”
“Oh, no,” I said. “No, it’s a different matter, a woman’s matter. His granddaughter gave her a gift, one that she treasures, and she wants to make a return on the occasion of her wedding. She asked me to arrange a gift.”
Nolius looked puzzled, and glanced at Palmira: of course they thought I had muddled the story, and they were right, I knew I had gotten something in it wrong. But it didn’t matter. Let that be the story. It was strange enough already. “It was a gift given before her wedding,” I added, though, to make it a little less strange to them.
Palmira said, “Ah!” very delicately, and they both decided at once they wouldn’t press the question more, after all. There wasn’t any sense bringing up the old days when they might have been rude to me in the hallways when we passed; the days when Irina and I lived in two cold rooms a little too high in the house for a duke’s daughter, and when she might have been glad for whatever present a Jew’s granddaughter might send her: a farsighted Jew’s granddaughter, who had been wiser than they, and planted a seed of gratitude that now would come to flower.
“Well, of course it must be something notable,” Nolius said firmly: anyone whohadrecognized my lady must be rewarded, since otherwise those who had neglected her must be punished. “No jewels, of course, or money. Perhaps something for her household…”
“We should ask Edita’s advice,” Palmira said, meaning the housekeeper, and Nolius was also happy to have her come, sincehehad lowered himself, so a few minutes later she came, too, and had tea with cherries and asked me questions about the tsar’s palace.
“It’s too cold for an old woman,” I said. “Such windows everywhere! Taller twice over than this whole wall,” I showed them with my hand, “and the wall as long as the ballroom, and that is only the bedchamber. Six fireplaces going at once, to keep from freezing alive, and everything in gold, everything: the windows and the table legs and the bath, everything. Six women to clean the room.”
They all sighed with pleasure, and Edita said to Nolius, “I don’t envy whoever runs his household! So many to manage!” and he nodded seriously back to her, both of them of course full of glowing envy, but since they could not have the trouble of it themselves, they would at least content themselves by reminding each other with pleasure that they, too, had a great household to manage, and understood as others could not how difficult it was.
