Page 22 of Spinning Silver
With that he snatched up his cloak and flung it on, and he swept out of the room and slammed the door behind him.
Chapter 11
I like goats because I know what they will do. If I leave the pen open, or there is a loose post, they get out and run away, eating the crops, and if I don’t watch out for their legs they kick me when I milk them, and if I hit them with a stick they run, but if I hit them very hard they will runalwayswhen they see me, unless they are very hungry and I have food. I can understand goats.
I tried to understand Da, because I thought if I did, he would hit me less, but I didn’t ever manage it, and for a long time I didn’t understand Wanda, because she was always telling me to go away, but she would make me food along with everyone else and give me clothing sometimes. Sergey was kind to me most of the time, but sometimes he wasn’t, and I didn’t know why about that, either. Once I thought maybe it was because I had killed our Mama being born, but I asked Sergey and he told me I had been three years old when our Mama died and it was a different baby that killed her.
That day I went to the tree and saw her grave and the baby’s grave, and I told her I was sorry she was dead. She told me she was sorry, too, and to stay out of trouble and listen to Wanda and Sergey, so I did, as much as I could.
But now Wanda and Sergey were gone and Da was dead, and it was just me and the goats and the long walk to town before us. I had only ever gone to town once before, the day the Staryk caught Sergey, and I almost didn’t go then. When I found him, first I thought that no one would help me, but then I thought maybe I was wrong about that the way I was wrong about other things and so I should at least try. Then I wondered who should I ask, Da or Wanda. Da was much closer, he was just in the field working, and Wanda was all the long way away in town and wouldn’t come home for hours and hours, and all that time Sergey would be lying in the woods. But I still wasn’t sure, so I ran and asked Mama, and she told me to go to Wanda, so that’s what I did. And that was the only time I had ever been to town.
I couldn’t go as fast now, leading the goats, but I didn’t really want to go fast anyway. I knew that Wanda liked Panova Mandelstam, and she gave us eggs sometimes, but she was someone else I didn’t know and wouldn’t understand, and I didn’t know what I would do if she told me to go away. I didn’t think I could go back and ask Mama in the tree for help anymore; otherwise she would not have given me the nut, because the nut was for being taken away. So I was afraid to get to town in case Panova Mandelstam didn’t let me stay, and then I would just be in town with four goats and only me and I wouldn’t know what to do.
But Wanda had been right, because when I did finally reach the house, Panova Mandelstam came out right away and said, “Stepon, why are you here?” as if she knew who I was, even though I had only come to the house one time, and I had never talked to her at all, only Wanda. I wondered if maybe she was a witch. “Is Sergey sick? He couldn’t come tonight? But why do you have the goats?”
She was saying so many things and asking so many questions I didn’t know which one to answer first. “Will you let me stay?” I said instead, desperately, because I couldn’t help wanting to know that, first. I thought she could ask me all her questions afterwards. “And the goats?”
She stopped talking and looked at me and then she said, “Yes. Put them in the yard, and come inside and have some tea.”
I did what Panova Mandelstam told me, and when I went inside she gave me a cup of hot tea that was much better than any tea we ever had at home, and she gave me some bread with butter and when I ate it all she gave me another piece and when I ate all of that she gave me another withhoney.My stomach was so full I could feel it with my hand.
Panov Mandelstam came in while I was eating. I was a little worried at first because I thought by then that maybe everything was all right because Panova Mandelstam was a mother. I didn’t really understand what mothers were, because mine was in a tree, but I knew they were very good things and you were very angry and sad if you lost them, because Wanda was and Sergey was too, and anyway, whenever Da came into our house I always wanted to run away, like the goats. But it was not like when Da came into the house when Panov Mandelstam came in: it did not get noisy. He only looked at me and then he went to Panova Mandelstam and said to her very softly as if he didn’t want me to hear, “Did Wanda come with him?”
She shook her head. “He brought his goats. What is it, Josef? Has there been trouble?”
He nodded and put his head closer to hers so I couldn’t hear the words he was whispering, but I didn’t need to, because of course I knew what the trouble was already, it was Wanda and Sergey going away, because Da was dead in our house. Panova Mandelstam snatched up her apron and covered her mouth as he told her, and then she said fiercely, “I don’t believe it! Not for a minute. Not our Wanda! That Kajus is as good as a thief, he always was. Making trouble for that poor girl—” Panov Mandelstam was hushing her, but she turned and said to me, “Stepon, they are saying terrible things about Wanda and your brother Sergey in town. They say that—they killed your father.”
“They did,” I said, and they both stared at me. They looked at each other, and then Panov Mandelstam sat down next to me at the table and said to me quietly, the way I talked to a goat when it was scared, “Stepon, will you tell us what happened?”
I was worried when I thought about having to tell him all of it, all the words it would take, because I was not good at talking. “It will take a long time for me to say it,” I said. But he only nodded, so I did my best, and they didn’t say anything to interrupt me, even though I did take a long time. Panova Mandelstam also sat down after a little while, her hands still over her mouth.
When I was finished they still didn’t say anything for a while, and then Panov Mandelstam said, “Thank you for telling us everything, Stepon. I am very glad Wanda sent you to us. You will have a home with us as long as you want it.”
“What if I want to stay forever?” I said, to make sure.
“Then you have a home with us as long as we have one ourselves,” he said. Panova Mandelstam was crying, next to me, but she wiped her eyes and then she got up and gave me some more bread and tea.
It was a strange way to spend my first night as tsarina. I made a bed of my white furs in front of the mirror and slept right there upon them, so I could have snatched them in my arms and leapt through the glass in moments. I only slept fitfully, raising my head every little while to listen. But no one came in the night. I woke finally with the sky going pale and the morning bells ringing, and after a moment, I stood up and took the chair out from under the doorknob, and then I tapped on the door until the yawning guards outside opened it—two different men than the guards who had brought me upstairs the night before. I wondered what had happened to those men. Nothing good, I imagined, if Mirnatius really thought I had bribed them.
“I must go to morning prayers,” I told the new guards, with as much certainty as I could put into the words: Imustgo. “Will you show me the way? I don’t know the house.”
With a demon wanting to devour me, I was feeling inclined to be devout, and there was no one to tell the guards that I was less so at home, so they didn’t think anything of it. They took me down to the small church, and I knelt there with my head bowed, letting my lips move through the prayers. There weren’t many people, only the priest and a few older women of the household who looked at me approvingly, which might be useful. The unseasonable cold blew in through the wooden walls. But I didn’t mind it, a pale echo of the cold of that winter kingdom on the other side of the mirror, my refuge. It helped me to be cold, to think.
There was a statue standing in a niche next to me of Saint Sophia, bound in chains with her eyes turned up to heaven. A pagan tsar had bound her in those chains and cut off her head for preaching, but she’d won the war, if not the battle, and now the chains were kept with the sacred relics in the cathedral in Koron, and brought out when they crowned the tsars and on other special occasions. They’d been used when the late tsarina, Mirnatius’s mother, had been caught trying to kill his older brother with sorcery; and even if she’d had a demon familiar of her own, they had bound her long enough to burn her at the stake.
So Mirnatius had good cause not to display his powers in front of a crowd. He hadn’t simply leapt on me in the middle of the dining room, or in the sleigh for that matter, and he didn’t want the inconvenience of persuading everyone that I’d run away. I tried to take heart from that, but it was precious little to take heart from. I could try to draw borders around his power, but they were terrifyingly wide: he was my husband, and he was the tsar, and he was a sorcerer with a demon of flame, a demon thatwantedme. And the only power I had was to flee into a world of ice and die in a slightly less gruesome way.
But I couldn’t stay in the church forever. The service had ended. I had to get up and go with the old women back into the house, and when we came into the hall for breakfast, Mirnatius was there, saying to the duke’s wife, “Has anyone seen my beloved wife this morning?” as if he had no idea whatever might have happened to me, and there was a hard intent look in his eyes where they fixed upon her, as if he wanted to push something into her head.
The women were a gaggle around me, and there were servants laying out breakfast, and Duke Azuolas himself coming in; I took comfort from their presence and said clearly, across the room, “I was at prayers, my lord.”
Mirnatius nearly leapt out of his skin and whirled round to stare at me as if I were a ghost, or a demon myself. “Where did you go last night!” he blurted out, even in front of our witnesses.
But what he didn’t do was summon up his demon, or leap upon me and drag me away screaming, and I let out a breath of relief silently between my lips and lowered my eyes demurely. “I slept very well after you left, my lord,” I said. “I hope you did as well.”
He was staring me up and down, and then at the guards on either side of me, who were now grinning a little at him in congratulatory form, quite obviously unsuspecting; everyone around us hid their smiles at my newlywed enthusiasm. By the time my husband’s eyes returned to my face, he had gone wary. The wreck he had made of my bedroom had included my bridal chest, and all my gowns, and his magic had repaired all of them as well. I could tell from his stare when he recognized the work of his own imagination in the elaborate vining patterns of my lace overdress. He plainly had no idea what to make of it.
I steeled myself and crossed the room to take his arm. “I am quite hungry,” I added, as if I did not notice him stiffening a little bit away from me. “Shall we go in to break our fast?”
