Page 25 of Spinning Silver
I pressed my lips tight. “What are the duties of a Staryk queen?” I asked coldly, after a moment’s thought. Of course I didn’t want to be of anymoreuse to him, but work made one’s place in the world. If I’d improbably become the wife of an archduke, surrounded by servants, I would have had a guess at what there was for me to do—a household to manage, and children when they came; and fine embroidery and weaving and making a court. Here I had no idea what I was even meant to do, and if I didn’t like it, still, I wanted to neglect my duties deliberately, and not just because I was a stupid girl who didn’t know what they were.
“They depend upon her gifts, of which you have but the one,” he said. “Occupy yourself with it.”
“I might get so bored without any variety that I’d stop doing it,” I said. “You may as well tell me what others there are, and leave it to me to decide which ones I’ll try.”
“Will you make a hundred years of winter in a summer’s day, or wake new snow-trees from the earth?” he said, and it was jeering. “Will you raise your hand and mend the mountain’s wounded face? When you have done these things, then truly will you be a Staryk queen. Until then, cease the folly of imagining yourself other than you are.”
There was a deep ringing quality to his voice as he spoke, almost a chanting, and I had the unpleasant feeling he was mocking me with truth rather than nonsense. As if a Staryk queenmighttake it into her head to make winter in the midst of summer, and make that cracked mountainside whole again with a wave of her hand. And here I sat instead, in the place of some great sorceress or ice-witch, a drab mortal girl with nothing to do but make a vast river of gold for him to gloat over.
I was sure he wanted me to feel small, with his mockery, and I didn’t mean for him to succeed. So when he finished jeering, I said coldly, “As I haven’t yet learned to make the snow fall to suit me, I’ll content myself with being what I am. And my next question is, how do I know when the sun has set, in the mortal world?”
He frowned at me. “You don’t. What difference can it make, when you are not there?”
“I still need to celebrate Shabbat,” I said. “It begins at sundown tonight—”
He shrugged impatiently, interrupting. “This is no concern of mine.”
“Well, if you won’t help me find out when Shabbat actuallyis,I’ll have to treat every day as Shabbat from now on, since I’m sure to lose track of the days without sunset and sunrise to mark them,” I said. “It’s forbidden to do work on Shabbat, and I’m quite sure that turning silver to gold counts as work.”
“Perhaps you will find a reason around it,” he said, silkily, and I didn’t need to work hard to find the threat in his words. Of course if I withheld my gift, I’d stop being valuable to him, and he wouldn’t keep me around long.
I looked him squarely in the face. “It’s a commandment of my people, and if I haven’t broken it to cook food when I was hungry, or to wake a fire when I was cold, or to accept money when I was poor, you needn’t expect me to break it foryou.”
Of course that was nonsense, and Iwouldhave done it if he put a knife to my throat. My people didn’t make a special virtue of dying for our religion—we found it unnecessary—and you were supposed to break Shabbat to save a life, including your own. But he didn’t need to know that. He scowled at me, and then he went out of the room again and came back a few minutes later with a mirror on a chain, a small round one in a silver frame like a pendant. Holding it cupped in his hand, he stared at it intently, and a flare of warm sunset light came out of it, not unlike the heaped gold shining out of the chest. He turned and dangled the mirror in the air in front of my face, and it was like peering out a keyhole at a slice of the horizon, orange light painting the sky with dark cold blue falling down over it, night coming on. But when I held my hand out to take it, he pulled it back and said coldly, “Ask for it, then, if you want it so badly.”
“May I have the mirror?” I said through my teeth. He held it over my hands and dropped it, so there was no chance we would touch, and instantly turned and left me.
Sergey and I didn’t reach the road to Vysnia. We started walking that way, through the forest, but after we walked for maybe an hour, we started to hear voices coming from the woods, and dogs barking. There were not many dogs left in the village anymore. Mostly people had eaten them because the winter was going so long. Only the best hunting dogs had been kept. Now they were hunting us. We stopped. Sergey said after a moment, “I could…go to them.”
If they had him, probably they would stop. They would not keep chasing me alone, most of them anyway. Then at least I would get away. If we kept going together, if we had to run, I would get tired first. Sergey was taller and stronger than me, and my skirts were not good for running in the woods. But I thought of them hanging Sergey, putting a rope around his neck and pulling him up off the ground, legs kicking in the air until he was dead. I had seen them hang a thief once that they took in the market. “No,” I said. So we turned back into the woods together.
For a little while it became quiet again, but then the sounds came back to our ears. First a bark far away, then another. They came closer. We hurried, and it became quiet again, but then we were tired, and we slowed down, and we heard a bark again, on one side of us, and another one on the other side. They were coming up around us like herding goats into a pen. There was snow still on the ground that had not melted yet, and we were leaving footprints. We could not help it.
Then suddenly it began to be dark. It wasn’t the sun going down yet. It felt as though we had been walking a very long time, but that was only because we were tired. Instead it was a great dark grey cloud coming over the sky. A gust of wind came in our faces, smelling of snow. I did not let myself think the snow would come. It was too late for a blizzard. It was almost June. But the flakes came, first a few, and then more than a few, and then we were alone in a clearing in the forest with a curtain of white all around us.
We did not hear any more barking or noises. The snow was coming fast and thick, and there was a heavy weight in the air that said it would fall for a long time. Everyone would have gone back to the village as quick as they could. We went onward as quick as we could, even though we had nowhere to go to, only away. The new snow was covering the old snow so we could not see the icy places or the mud hollows or the loose snow. My knee was hurt when I fell upon a hard stone hidden, and once Sergey tripped and went all the way on his front in the cold and wet and then there was snow clinging to his head in clumps that grew as we kept going.
I was used to walking a long way, but we had already come much farther than it was from my house to Miryem’s house, and that was on the road. But we had to just keep walking. We were not trying to walk towards the road. I didn’t know which way the road was anymore. We could have been walking in circles. The cold crept from my fingers up my arms and from my toes up my legs. My shoes were wet and a few straps were breaking. I could feel it from a little way off even though my feet were getting numb. Sergey had to stop and wait for me sometimes. Finally my shoe came all the way off and I tripped again and fell, and the pot went flying off.
We took a long time finding it. We should just have kept going, but we did not think of that until after we had dug through all the snowbanks around us, and our hands were almost frozen numb. We kept looking until finally I found a hole going all the way down to the bottom of a tall snowdrift and I dug it out. There was a small dent in the side. We looked at it and it was only a pot that we had nothing to cook in. And then we both knew we should have kept going, but we did not say so out loud. Sergey took the pot and we stood up to keep going.
But then I looked at the snowdrift. Some of the snow had come off the top, and under the snow it was a wall, only as high as my waist, but a real wall that someone had built of stones. It was not very long. On the other side, it was mostly clear, except for a very big snowdrift, twice Sergey’s height. It could have only been a few trees and bushes covered in snow, but when we climbed over the wall and went close, we saw that it was really a little hut, made of stones at the bottom and sticks above. An old dead curtain of ivy hung over all of it, over the walls and windows and the hole where the door had been. Ice had frozen over the dry leaves and snow had heaped on the ice. The vines broke right away and fell down when we pushed on them.
We went inside at once, without even waiting for our eyes to be able to see. It didn’t matter what was inside; it was better than outside. But after a few moments we could see there was a table and a chair and a bed made out of wood, and an oven. The slats had rotted away from the chair and the bed, and also the mattress, but the oven was still good and solid. There was a pile of old firewood sitting next to it.
I brushed up some crumbled slats from under the bed and some straw from the mattress for kindling, and then I sat down next to the oven and began to work up a fire with a few small sticks. I knew how to do it well because sometimes we would run out of wood and our fire would die and we would have to start it new again. Sergey put down our dented pot and warmed himself up a little with stamping. Then he went out again. When he came back, I had gotten a little fire going. He had two armfuls of wet wood and a miracle: potatoes. “There is a garden,” he said. The potatoes were small, but he had dug ten of them, and there was no one to eat them but us.
I fed the fire with the old wood until it was strong. We spread the wet wood that Sergey had brought in over the top of the oven and in front of it to dry. We put the potatoes into the oven and put our pot full of snow on to melt and get hot. We sat by the oven warming ourselves until the water boiled, and then we made cups of hot water and drank them to get warm inside. Then we boiled more water and I cut up the potatoes and put them into the water to cook the rest of the way. That way we would have the potatoes to eat, and we could drink the potato-water also. It felt like it took a long time for the potatoes to cook but then they were done and we ate them, hot and steaming and burning our tongues and so good.
We didn’t think about anything all that time, and while we were eating. We were so cold and so hungry. I was used to being cold and hungry but not as bad as that. It was worse than the winter when the food ran out. So I didn’t think about anything except getting warm and getting something to eat. But then we finished eating and we were warm and when I poured cups of potato-water for us out of the pot, I thought about the pot falling on Da with all the boiling-hot kasha in it, and I shook all over my body and it wasn’t with cold.
After that I was thinking again. I didn’t think about Da, I thought about us. They hadn’t caught us, they hadn’t hanged Sergey and me. We hadn’t frozen to death in the forest. Instead we were here, in this little house all alone in the woods, and we were warm by a fire and we had found potatoes, and I knew it wasn’t right.
Sergey knew, too. “No one lives here anymore, not for a long time,” he said to me. He said it very loud, as if he wanted to be sure anyone nearby would overhear it.
I wanted to believe it. But of course no real person would ever live here. The forest belonged to the Staryk. There was no road that came here. There was no farm or field. Only a little empty house in the woods for one person to live in all alone. It had to belong to a witch, and who knew whether a witch was dead or not, and when she might come back.
“Yes” was what I said, though. “Whoever lived here is gone now. Look at the bed and the chair. They have been rotting for a long time. Anyway, we will leave soon.” Sergey nodded just as eagerly as I had.
