Anna and Perkin Warbeck (At Last)

You're not a baby at all! You're an embittered drunken man. Why on earth have I been changing your diapers all this time?

It's complicated. Have another drink and we'll try to forget this conversation ever happened.

Is that a pistol? Where did you get a pistol?

I found it, OK? It's not a big deal.

It IS a big deal! You're supposed to be a baby and you're drunk. And you've been stealing weapons.

Lift me off of this stool and I'll explain everything. Here, you can hold onto the pistol even.

What is that accent anyway? You're not Russian.

Polish, probably. I'm from England really but I learnt Russian from a Polish priest.

I should never have nursed you.

Eh.

Will you put the rum down? You only weigh about ten pounds. That should kill you, drinking that much.

It's diluted.

It's mixed with vodka! That doesn't count as diluted.



Anna! Are you shouting at the baby?

She's not a baby. She's not even a girl. She's a rum-soaked English guy with a pistol. What is your name, anyway?

Svetok.

Baloney! That's not even English. You said you were English.

Call me Mitch then, if it makes you feel better. I'm going to have to leave.

Yeah, probably. I don't think Maria will be too pleased when she finds out who she adopted.

Heh. Heh.

It's not funny! She's married to the Grand Prince of Moscow! You might have inherited the whole city.

I think Ivan's on to me anyway. He caught me stealing his cognac but I played dumb.



You are talking to a baby.

Ali, listen to me. She's not a baby. I think she's a spy.

Eh. I quit that. Shemyaka creeps me out, with the pewter eyes and those curly fingernails. I should have stayed in England.

English, eh? Tut tut. I should have known from her multiple rows of brown and yellow fangs.

I'd have better teeth if somebody had nursed me more! Eck eck eck.

You disgust me. How old are you really?

Couldn't say. I figure about 24. I need to put this diaper somewhere.

...

I quit this whole spy gig. I need a pair of tiny breeches. Anybody have a pair of tiny breeches?

Let's just cut a few holes in my qat pouch. Your gown isn't nearly as long as necessary.

So you were working for Shemyaka all this time? How much does he know now?

Enough to take the Kreml I expect. He didn't ask for any more information in the past week or so, so he must have learnt all he needed. Mostly he didn't want to have to pay me. Cheap buzzard.

How could he take the Kreml? He hasn't enough men.

Baba Yaga. He's got some sort of agreement worked out with her so they can take Ivan down.

Baba Yaga never works with anyone! She despises any sort of order or leadership of any kind. Why would she agree to work with Shemyaka?

I wasn't exactly privy to those conversations, ma'am. I saw them both together, and I gave information about the Kreml to one of her fekakta cats to relay back to her.

Calico Kitty is a spy now? Gott im Himmel. Is there nothing adorable left under God's skies?

Calico Kitty's name is Musil and he is a no-good cheat and a womanizer. You probably contracted something just petting him.

Oh... oh.

We've got to tell Ivan. They could be moving in even now.

Yeah, just set me into a basket of bulrushes with a pint of this, and give me my pistol back, and I'll be seeing youse.

I can't believe I nursed you.

Later, babe.

Linda Ivanits and the Long Thing

This happened in the old house.I chanced to go out into the hallway, when suddenly I saw a figure lying on the crossbeam. It resembled a person, was black as coal, and was long, about twenty feet, almost the length of the crossbeam. As soon as it caught sight of me, it hid I don’t know where.

Linda Ivanits, Russian Folk Belief p. 169. 1989 M. E. Sharpe, Inc. Armonk NY and London England

So the house now is exactly as it was, except that now there is this coal-black telephone pole waiting somewhere in it, waiting to get another nap and scare the bejeezus out of me.

Some house.

Maybe we should run down to Ikea and get a coat-rack and some candles?
Oh sure. That would make the place just perfect.
Except that there is a coal-black telephone pole that is really sleepy
and irritated that I stirred it from its sleep! Screw Ikea!!!!

I don’t know where it’s hiding. Where would you hide,
if you were a 20 foot long sleep-deprived telephone pole?
It’s not in the new house. It’s not in the cable television studio.
It’s not in the wind-powered eco-friendly green generator
that creates 50 megawatts of Earth Love.
No, it is definitely hiding here in the Old house.

What is it, the dirt floor?
The single-layered pane of glass keeping the telephone poles out?

I left a trail of candy hearts leading to the 4-car garage McMansion next door.
Go hence, evil telephone pole,
and find thence whole worlds of potential creep victims for your stunts.

Din’t work t’all.

I set up a burnt log with long eyelashes and lipstick, and a skimpy blouse and bloomers.
It was leaning against the shed, and I waited across the yard behind the logpile
with a vodka bottle full of kerosene and a wooden match.

Din’t work t’all.

What would make a hiding burnt pole happy? Right?

I fashioned a twenty foot long bed of straw and lath, with some music. Les Baxter.
And a tall cool glass of Bactine (for the burns).

Then I ran as fast as I could into the woods while the old house turned into a tornado of fire,
and everything was finally OK.

Vonka and the Pipe

The sun was getting ready to burn the tops of the birches. Vonka leaned against the plow for a moment to see if the trees would actually ignite, and watched his breath diffuse into mist. The mud clinging to his boots was almost frozen, but he remembered the mud smell from earlier in the year when the flies were still thick in the air. The sun touched the treetops, and made some gold, but there wasn’t fire. Or even smoke, or warmth. He pulled his boots out of the mud, one after the other, and started to make for the izba where he could rest when the day was done. The plow was caught on something. A root, a rock, a sleeping spirit in the muck. He backed the plow out and used the tip to pry the rock out into the fading light. It burped out some wet peat and gleamed a bit. Gleamed? He worked it out with frozen fingers, so he could see some kind of box. The birches were in front of the sun now, so he squinted at this muddy handful and coughed a little more mist. He wiped a little mud off of it, nestled it into his hood, and leaned into the plow to get it back soon.

Vonka let the hot barley and black bread warm his mouth, and dug the gleaming mud out of his soggy hood. There was something in the middle of the mud. He scraped the mud off on his shoe. It was a wooden box, with bronze clasps and bronze corners. It looked older than anyone in the village, so it wasn’t lost exactly, and he didn’t feel like it belonged to anyone who was alive to ask for it. It was like a root, or a rock, or a sleeping spirit, except it had something inside it that wasn’t from the village.

“Vonka! Eat your happy meal and get to bed! Tomorrow we finish plowing the Hetman’s river plot, and we have to bring the plow back to Rodisch before he deflowers your cousin!”

“Misha has deflowered herself a bunch of times awready, Mama. She probly scares Rodisch half to death, with wot she knows.”

“You Vonka!! Misha is pure as winterberry bushes. She waits for her husband even now.”

“Pffft. Ma, let me stay up a few minutes while I figure out how to open this.”

“If you found it in the field, then it belongs to Hetman. He sees all and knows all.”

“Mama! You are old and crazy! Hetman is just another unemployed Mongol knave that Beg Yrma gave some land to lord over. He can’t see anything---”

“What you find thurrr, lit’l farmer boiy?” said Hetman, pressing his huge bearded head through the open window.

“Hain’t found anything, Hetman sir. Just putting some barley away for tomorrow. Big day of plowing, you know. Coming up to Feast of St. Grifkhzisich! Time to gather the barley and such.”

“I smell brass fittin’s. And old Viking wood. Possably ash. You done found a ash box wit brass fittings, an’ I betcha it are got a age-old magic pipe wot in.”

“No, you smell barley I am eatin, and mud on my boot. There be brass fittings on the icon over in the corner. in’t it so, Mama?”

“O Hetman! He done found it in the field! He kep it in his soggy hood and plant to keep it f’r’imself!”

“Mama! You crazy.”

But Hetman had reached a long spidery arm into the izba and teased the wooden box out of Vonka’s hood. He grinned a jack-o-lantern grin, and flourished a long spidery arm about in the light cast from the peat fire out the window, making to open the brass fittings on Vonka’s box.

“Give it back! Ain’t yours tall.”

“If’n you found it in the fields I told your’n ta plow, then’t mine. And it’ve in’t?”

A pipe. Meerschaum, if I didn’t know better, with a long arcing stem of orange wood, and an intensely glowering face as of a judging God, with eyes of pure burning hatred.

“A PEEP! Ceci n’est pas un pipe. This l’l devil is Khoschchei the Deathless, ain’tcha?! Wot a score. I will pack with some tabac, and light ‘er up, and”

Luckily, Hetman was dead before he finished his plan. Afanasy stepped into the light with a cloud of bees, ready for a puff of tabac.

“Ho, Vonka! How is your gelatin collection?”

The Three Princesses and the Mud Dwarf

Maria, Olga and Anna had finally coaxed their teacher to stop teaching: the trick was to get his pupils to dilate and his jaw to slacken, then his head would sort of withdraw into his chest cavity and stars would emerge from his eye sockets and revolve, predictably, around his head. He would become a planetarium. The lights would dim, and the unknowable secrets of deep space began to glow from the recesses of the kitchen. Spiral galaxies, dark spectral maneuvers, and vaguely familiar space gods would become visible, just barely in one’s peripheral vision, right where one would usually put away the drinking glasses. This was when the three princesses could slowly back away from Ali Qushji and slip out through the star-spangled wooden back door, and out into the woods.

After a long while or a short while, they were as lost as they had hoped to get. There were no paths through the pine needles, or everything was a path. There was a vague sound of cheering coming from the horizon, but who knows what direction that was. There were wildflowers, ferns and club moss, and mushrooms, and a rusty sleigh in the mud. There were two muddy leather boots that were on the sleigh, and the moss grew enthusiastically from the stitching that held the sole to the last. Why a last? Olga gripped the wet and slippery shoe, and the mud around the sleigh began to churn angrily.

“Olga, you silly maiden! That is no last! That is a foot.” sang Anna in a teasing song. “A foot! A foot. Olga pulled the muddy foot!” Anna was only six years old.

“Be still, Anna. We can still replace the shoe on the foot and return to Ali Qushji. He may not have noticed that we left. It isn’t lunchtime yet,” mused Maria, the oldest.

So, they replaced the slippery leather shoe on the slippery wrinkled foot, and began to skip and dawdle in the bog. They dawdled toward the cheering sound. But after they dawdled for a long while or a short while, they stopped and saw another rusty sleigh! With another pair of slippery leather shoes! Or, the same sleigh!

“Oh!” giggled Anna, who began to slip wreaths of cornflowers around the ankle that was attached to the foot. She daubed angry eyes on the hairy leg that was attached to the ankle. With sticky mud. That stuck to her little fingers.

“Soon the sun will disappear! Then Papa will be exceedingly cross that we made our teacher lapse into a dissociative fugue state, and shall send us to bed without our hot kasha!” cried Olga.

Fortunately, when the sun set they were able to find their way back to the Kreml easily. For Ali Qushji, whose eyes were still rolled back in his head, and whose head was still withdrawn into his chest cavity like a box turtle, was projecting the stars out past the kitchen where the girls had their putative lessons. The stars that Ali Qushji knew were not the same stars that shined in the sky over Moscow. So the girls looked for the terrifying crab nebulae and inside-out space gods that Ali Qushji would project, overlaid on the regular stars, and they guided the girls back to the familiar fortress where their Papa gladly shouted at them and sent them to their Beds without their Hot Kasha.

And the Mud Dwarf saw the cornflowers on his ankle, and he wept.

The Elk of Notice

Afanasy, being short of money, ran his fingers through the crazed roots of the Mighty Tree. He had some recollection of money buried there, either something he had buried or else something his father had buried. Or his grandad, whoever that was. There had to be some reason why the roots of the Mighty Tree felt like they had money squirreled away somewhere. Somehow, though, he kept coming up with nothing but mud, and beech nuts. Was this the right Mighty Tree? There could be no question. He knew the ants that lived here, and the upside-down finches, and the blood moss. The whole tree smelt of old buried money? So?

“Foma!”

“Eh?”

“Where’d you put the money you stole from this tree?”

“Some sort of box, probly. Tied it to a elk or something. It promised not to spend it all.”

Foma, tied to the front of the sleigh, gave short concise directions toward the elk. After a week, during which Afanasy periodically wiped the snow from Foma’s eyes, they began to circle in closer to the Elk of Notice.

“Elk!”

“Mmm.” replied the Elk of Notice. The elk had two rows of glittering gold teeth, and the word “ELK” spelt out in diamonds across the incisors. It was also sporting a very dashing Genoese hat, an imported leather wine bag in a red sling, and some sort of exotic bird feathers woven into its rack. There were a pair of hired Cossack ladies feeding it forbs and giggling.

“Elk, you didn’t have Cossack ladies last time I seen you.”

“Nope.”

“Nor did you have extravagant feathers. Or a wine bag! What happened to your wonderful old urine-soaked outfit?¹”

“I bought some feathers, and a wine bag, and these gypsy girls. Is that OK with you?” he bugled.²

“I liked you better when you reeked of urine.”


THE END

¹ “Probably the most easily identified elk sign is the mud wallow scented with urine and droppings. Bull elk roll in wallows to cover their bodies with scent, creating bathtub-size depressions with low walls of displaced mud ringing their perimeters. Receptive cow elk, drawn by the odor, will also roll and urinate in the wallow, indicating their willingness to mate. Elk that use these wallows may become so foul smelling that, when downwind, humans can easily detect their presence.” Quoted from “Elk” by Russell Link, at http://wdfw.wa.gov/living/elk.html

² “Elk are the noisiest member of the deer family in North America. Males are known for their eerie bugles during the rutting season. The bugle starts with a guttural groaning that quickly yields to a high-pitched whistle, and often ends with a few repetitive low-toned grunts.” Quoted from “Elk” by Russell Link, at http://wdfw.wa.gov/living/elk.html

Wow!

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