Das Brick, and Carl

I was about ready to spend some time outside Afanasy's bag and see where we were. I could hear voices, more and more of them, lots of kids and livestock, even some music. Some kind of hurdy-gurdy and cymbals. The rain has stopped. Afanasy stopped walking and dropped me abruptly as he took up conversation with what sounded like a flirtatious girl. I heard bees hovering around expectantly.

"Seen any highwaymen yet? I'm looking for some hose and doublet."

"Hardly yet, Fana. I heard that Cherny took everything they had from that legate from Burgundy. He was dressed nice... I expect Cherny will be here at lunch break to sell the clothes. You don't wear hose and doublet though - let alone French. What're you up to?"

"Ahh spring! A young man fills his pate with wet earth, and budding grasses and wants to take up some stolen French gabardines. For the ladies, if you will."

"I'd suppose rather that you need clothing for the poor will-o' you got in there sack. He naked?"

I suddenly was gazing up from the leather satchel at the prettiest face I'd ever laid eyes on.

"O he's not bad, Fana? I'd say you let him out for some air. He does need clothes tho. Wot do you call that ye've got on?"

"It's... it's from Sarai..." I lied. I still had on my red t-shirt from El Pelon, and some green Levi's. Foma had loaned me a few pairs of lice-ridden wool socks, and I still had the squirrel-fur cloak from the Pine Cone.

"Of yes you're from Sarai: all right. And I'm from St. Brennan's Isle. What a cute one! Can I keep 'im?" She had taken my doughy face in both hands and was sniffing my forehead. How dearly I wanted to get out of the sack!

"Found that one in the woods. Bees found him first. He's from some nemets town out west, apparently."

"He's an angel from God's heaven."

"Could be. He sure can't fight for nothing. I'm keeping him hid til we can get him to look like he ain't a spy. I hear there are spies avaunt."

"Spies are all around, indeed. Ivan's been dunking everyone at the Kreml to see what they know."

"Great. I'm in need of a good thrashing and a bath."

"That you are. Can I help him change?"

"You're a friendly one alright. Das, this is Anna. She'll be your best mate until she spies someone else wot interests her. Speaking of..."

He quickly yanked the tarred bowline that closed the top of the sack, and I was surrounded again by darkness. I heard a sound like a washerwoman beating a wet quilt with a pair of swim fins. Even through the walls of the sack I picked up an agreeable scent of herring.

"Yer here to fight at last!" bellowed a very wet, boisterous voice in a strange accent like French and Hindi. It was a magnificent, booming voice like a great wooden instrument, with ringing laughter hanging from it like golden tassels. It reminded me of hearing Louis Armstrong's solos from the 1920s.

A throng of children seemed to come running at those words. "Alnus is gonna fight Afanasy! Get your sausage and elk meat!" "Kvas!" "Kvas!" they shouted.

"I'll take 1/3, you take 1/3. Winner gets 1/3. I get sole distribution rights for kvas, elk meat, and stimulants. You get sole distribution rights for wax, honey, hand-carved tchotchkes. We kick Foma for rights to Anna at the end. Ne ves?"

"I have forever wanted to wrestle the great Alnus Rugosa! No, I say! No! No rights and no money! Only fight for to see whom God favors and who is wrestling rex imperator!!" Afanasy shouted, beating his chest thunderously. The crowd, which sounded like it was growing rapidly, cheered rapturously.

"Kvas! Kvas! Elk meat! Get your elk meat!"

The cymbals and broken bagpipe swelled to an enthusiastic horrible din. The sack was suddenly being pulled over many pointy objects that bedevilled my lower ends. I puzzled over this, and wondered if it was wise to spring from the sack to escape my captor, or feign being a pile of laundry. Just as I was remembering that escape was utterly futile, I felt a hand kneading my buttocks through the sack.

"Anna?"

"Don't try to escape. I'll let you out in a minute." and the dragging continued, through what sounded like deep mud and an array of feral pigs.

"The hetmen are now accepting bids for Alnus at 13 to 1, and for Afanasy Nikitin against. Please place your bets at this time. Are there any bets from the stinking pit?"

"NO!" shouted a chorus of voices from some sort of stinking pit.

"Doris! Carl! Open up!" hissed Anna. After a moment there was a heavy rattle of chains and the sound of well-joined wood squeaking. I was dragged up several stairs that seemed to break my bones. I heard heavy agitated sounds of primates.

"Oh yes, Carl, we loves you too! Doris! Yes! We loves you! Mmmm." said Anna. "Open the bag, won't you Carl?"

And a kind, reflective orangutan peered into the sack at me. He had a wide face with a tasseled velvet cap and a brocaded jacket that looked immaculately tailored, or Italian or both. He grabbed my head and we touched foreheads.

"Carl, this is Das. Das, Carl."

Doris the Wonderful Hostess!

Doris had some sort of brass and glass contraption on her head, and wore only a sash with jewel-encrusted daggers ensheathed. She wore black silk armbands. She looked like some sort of Chinese martial artist.

"Doris, Das. Das, Doris." and she too touched foreheads.

"Let's avaunt to the mezzanine, before the wrestling begins!" sang out Anna. We were in a warmly appointed drawing room of some indiscriminate style. The walls were parqueted in rich amber wood panels, and the scents of exotic perfumes, powdered liquid and unguent hung heavy in the air. Great heads of pre-Cambrian animals hung on the walls, their titanic racks of antlers streaking madly through the air overhead. Anna was already bounding up the wooden stairs, drawing the hems of her gown up above her knees so I was for the first time aware of her dazzling limpid form. She was barefoot, and her dirty feet left mud in her wake. The two orangutans bounded joyfully after. I swallowed hard and took to the stairs.

We came to a landing, then another flight, then a second landing. We moved through a hallway, past a room that smelled of the sea, and into a narrow room with a thick knotted rope hanging in the center. Anna swiftly climbed up through a hole in the ceiling into the attic, or whatever it was, and the two orangutans swung effortlessly after. When I emerged into the sunlight, we were among a dozen or so characters on a veranda, quaffing drinks and spitting tobacco off the roof. We had an exalted view of the glade below, where Afanasy and Alnus were just beginning to square off amidst the teeming masses, the broken bagpipes, the hurdy gurdy, and the smell of charred elkmeat.

Anna sat on a carved wooden bench of dense hard wood that I would have thought to be tropical, next to a brooding Arabic scholar and a passed-out Viking. I sat next to her, and she pulled an enormous fur around us. I recognized FVMMA talking agitatedly with some very filthy young boys in sweaters. Some of Afanasy's bees had joined the group as well.

Afanasy lurched, swung Alnus around and crushed him into the mud. Alnus seemed to disappear altogether. Then a pair of muddy webbed feet emerged, encircled Afanasy's neck, and pulled him entirely into the mud as well. The crowd cheered, and jeered, and danced. For a minute or two there was nothing to watch save some bubbles. Then a nearby tree began to shake, and jerk to one side and then another, and then it caromed down into the mud. Momentarily it sprang back up with Afanasy trailing one side like a heraldic banner hanging from a coronet. He dropped to the ground, performing a neat handflip, and plunged a forearm into the earth like a magician feeling in his hat for... taa daah! Alnus was yanked thence and resolutely grabbed Afanasy by the neck (such as he had) and thrust him upside-down and backwards.

Alnus' limbs are very elongated and thin, like pipe cleaners. There is no clear musculature or articulation to them. They're like cobras. Except they stretch a little bit too. His head, which resembles nothing so much as a great molar covered with club moss, features a pair of unlidded eyes which always seem pleasantly surprised at what he beholds, and a great satchel mouth with two fangs. He is shrouded in robes like a Turkoman. His nimble webbed feet, like folded umbrellas, slap hearteningly across the field of battle, like fish slapping against seaweed-covered rocks.

The two heroes paused for a quick kvas and a puff from their respective pipes. Some jugglers and a trained wolf on a chain, the size of a horse, made the rounds. Children placed their heads in the wolf's mouth and pelted his loins with coins.

Then the battle was enjoined again. They both executed a neat pas-de-deux and collided with a bone-rending crunch and slap. A roundhouse kick to the face! Jiu jitsu! A neat escape from a double nelson by the beyond-double-jointed Alnus! Alnus thrown like a discus into the woods!

And then the screaming began. A belch of acid from the great cirro-cumulus clouds, which burnt off the beard of an elder. Then the pointing at the clouds, and the bagpipe guy ran, and the kids ran, and the wolf. Because there was a great castle-sized wooden beast in the sky, with great horrible wooden wings and three goggling heads coughing out acid and sulfur. And screaming.

Then it was gone.

Then some trees were on fire, just over the horizon. Then it was back. Low, now, blocking out the sky.

"Why's the Ghugguk here? It's spring!" quoth Alnus, still winding his pipe cleaners around Afanasy's neck.

"GHUGGUK!!" screamed a couple of the goggling heads. Some acid hissed diabolically in the mud next to the wrestlers.

The benches and furs and such were getting dragged into a roll-up shelter on the roof next to us. "We should get inside. This is going to get worse," said Anna. The orangutans rolled the cover down and bounded back down the rope ladder.

Afanasy Has Been Imprisoned

He knew before he opened his eyes that he was back in Dmitri Shemyaka's crappy stone fort. It always smelled like ozone and burnt cabbage, and he kept all the windows bricked up so the air felt suffocatingly close. He could also tell that the arrow shafts had been taken out, with great skill, doubtless by the blind surgeon himself, and the wounds dressed with something like gunpowder. He felt shot through with melted candlewax. 

"Hey great! You're alive! Now I can blind you. Welcome back."

"Where are my bees?"

"In bee jail. What'd you think - I'd let them go back to the Kreml and get your toadies for you?"

"I don't suppose you know where Olga is."

"You'd best thank your glauenfraupt I don't. I'd have killed you, and saved her for blinding! Is she lost?"

"One of your guys took her. He was in a pin-oak, with some expensive-looking cuirasses."

"Sounds like she's with Fergamont. He's some sort of half-Saxon half-Swede whelp. He's not very careful with women though. Baba! You should hear this!"

"Baba Yaga!? She's here in your crappy little hideout? Come on..."

"No, no. Baba Yaga's getting old and tired, and getting far too friendly with Ivan and his milquetoasts. Yaga's days are numbered, babe. This forest belongs to Baba Ghannoush."

There was silence, then a rustling of heavy crushed velvet and heavy tread of a jungle cat. 

More than six feet tall, and redolent of musk and orchids and loam. She walked slowly, barefoot, the better to hear her panther's pads and claws on the pumice floor. Her legs, bare to mid-thigh, were unmistakably shaped like an athletic woman's, but covered with radiant patterned fur like a panther's. Her strange velvet robe was slung over one ivory shoulder like a toga, and her arms were unnaturally long and lithe, like gently undulating asps. Most peculiar of all, her iridescent gray hair and her ivory face were simply out of focus. Stare as Afanasy might, he could get only the faintest idea of her appearance. He couldn't take his eyes off of her.

"Fergamont has one of the Shuisky girls - she's probably with him at the Vydischchii camp tonight, if she's even still breathing."

"Whatever is left of her will be here by nightfall," she breathed. She sounded like gas escaping from a vent.

A great pestle, inlaid with mother-of-pearl and a pair of sapphire eyes, sauntered into the cramped hall on what looked like peacock legs. 

"Hey! It's Baba Yaga's pestle!"

"It's much nicer than hers. Hers is old." she gasped, bounding effortlessly up and into the wooden bowl. The pestle took a step back and vanished through a doorway. The whiff of musk and orchids and loam lingered for a moment, and then the crappy burnt cabbage and ozone smell was all that was left.

"Any other information for me before I remove your beady little eyeballs?" croaked the pewter-eyed wretch.

"Not really. Why are you blinding me, again? I thought you had it in for Ivan. You think he's going to trade his eyes for mine? A swap?"

"I just like reminding him I'm out here, every once in a while. I thought it'd be a nice excuse for Ghannoush to introduce herself at Ivan's oh-so-regal court, with a sack of your eyeballs." Shemyaka was efficiently sharpening a nasty-looking little dirk with an s-shaped blade, drawing it against a strop while he spoke.

"Ideomenes! Bring the sack for the eyeballs please. And some cotton balls for the sockets. And I'd love a glass of aqua vitae and coriander." He turned to Afanasy. "Ivan's father had my eyes put out many years ago. Or did you know that already?"

"I've been told. You were going to poke my eyes out the last time you captured me, remember?"

"It's coming back to me. How did you escape that time?"

"My idiot Foma was hiding in your galley and snuck out under a serving dish. You thought he was a suckling pig when you smelled him. Then he bit your - "

"Yes! The roast pig. Ideomenes! No roast pig, you understand? None! None at all!"

Ideomenes bobbed into the hall, hunchbacked and hooded. He was pushing a heavy wooden cart missing a wheel.

"No pig, master."

"Good!"

"Why is your voice different, Ideomenes? Why do you sound like a woman?"

"I'm not Foma, master."

"I know that. Foma only speaks when he wants something, am I right?"

Afanasy and Dmitri chuckled together at this, and shook their heads as they silently recalled how awful Foma is.

"Ha... no, but really. Do you have a cold or something?"

At which point, of course, Olga took the burlap eyeball-bag and pulled it firmly over Shemyaka's disbelieving head, then pulled the drawstring tight and secured the knot with the nasty little zig-zag dirk. She drank the aqua vitae and coriander, and parked the broken cart and the cotton balls on top of the villain. With the two damascene cuirasses, she flayed the linen cords binding Afanasy, and together they ran into the stables where a pestle awaited. Shemyaka, head still bound, shook his fist at the sky as they soared into the clouds.

Afanasy Falls Out of a Tree

Afanasy and Olga were crouching in the tall grass, waiting for their chance to steal more food from the soldiers. They already had a sack of meal, a box of plums, and a hogshead of hog's heads. The soldiers were smashing open another crock of vodka and many were beginning to drop like cordwood into the clay. Something moved in the hedges a few yards east, and a branch broke loudly.

"Foma must have gotten out of the bag - probably smelled the meat cooking on the campfire. You keep an eye on the aide-de-camp with the blunderbuss, and I'll go quiet him down." Afanasy began commando-crawling across to where Foma was hiding.

The aide-de-camp set his blunderbuss down and began singing atrociously with a half-dressed Cossack. "The Song of the Volga Boatmen" I believe. Olga quickly dashed, ferretlike, from the grass across a clearing and into the dusky camp.

Afanasy froze. Did Olga see the sentry in the tree with the damascene cuirasses? Perhaps not. She came to a stop directly beneath the sentry and hid herself behind the very pin-oak tree he sat in.

"Lord, our deliverer and holiest of holies, please deliver that beautiful woman. Amen."

A long leathery arm reached down from the branches, bundled a handful of Olga's cassock, and yanked her abruptly up into the tree.

Afanasy lunged at the spot where Foma hid, hoping to use the besotten serf as a projectile. When he cleared away the grass, however, he discovered not Foma but a group of six or seven hungry brigands also waiting for an opportunity to steal food from the soldiers.

"Pardon!" he hissed, as he turned tail and ran pell-mell toward the tree where Olga and the sentry were tucked away. "The Song of the Volga Boatmen" immediately ceased. The blunderbuss exploded and Afanasy heard a carcass of one of the highwaymen drop heavily behind his sprinting feet. The explosion brought the attention of the entire reeling camp of soldiers on to Afanasy and the team of thugs behind him. The thugs drew bows and a soldier fell as a whistling passed Afanasy's cocked ears.

Only feet from the Olga tree, Afanasy tripped over a drunken private and spun, shouting, into the clay. A soldier with an oak barrel over his head made a phlegmy roar and another boozer came at him with a rusty javelin. Afanasy rolled deftly to his left, kicked at the shins of the barrel-holder and rolled backwards over his own head. The javelin came down and sank into the barrel, and Afanasy sprang up, catching the javelin-tosser across the jaw with a solid right hook. Two of the stinking brigands leapt onto his back and began to pummel him about the head with something like brass candlesticks. Afanasy began quietly singing his own setting of Psalm 37, tugging both assailants off him by the ankles, neatly bouncing their skulls off one another and then collected the candlesticks.

"Hmmm. Venetian, I'd guess."

He sent one spinning end-over-end at an archer as another arrow clipped his chest, tearing a hole in his jersey. The blunderbuss fired again, and a toothless thief with half a beard and half a baked pig spun and fell over Afanasy's left shoulder.

Afanasy yanked the rusty javelin from the cask, causing a foamy geyser of Bavarian aspic ale to gush up. With this the brigands ceased to take any interest in our hero, and descended upon the cask. He picked up an abandoned leather shield and lunged back toward the tree. A shower of arrows began to descend upon him as more soldiers were rousted from their drunken nest, and he crouched for a moment under his rattling shield. He prayed once again for Olga, who had now been captive for a full three minutes. There was a momentary pause in the archery, and instantly the strains of the Volga Boatmen's song began again. Using the javelin, he pole-vaulted elegantly up into the branches of Olga's tree.

"Olga! Olga?" he shouted, as the arrows began to shudder into the trunk and boughs. He looked furiously at the branches above him, below, and then scrambled, snapping the haft of an arrow from his shoulder, looking to holes in the trunk where the cur could have hidden. Another arrow buried itself in his leg, and a third penetrated through the chain mail over his ribs enough to take his breath away. The branch beneath him slipped away and he felt himself tumbling through space as the night overtook his eyes. 

Afanasy and Bukol Take a Bath

Afanasy waited at the usual rendez-vous point, a rotted and mossy table in an overgrown garden. There were stone blocks, home to great sheets of lichen, for sitting on. Plyed lay behind him on his back, sniffing. Afanasy worked on a wooden sea monster with his ax, and communed silently with Khoshchei the Deathless.

It was raining in spurts, so that circles formed on the punky flaccid table irregularly. Bees lifted off and set down, sometimes in pairs. A heron stared from a stand of birches across the clearing. Afanasy was slowly regarding the entire overgrown garden, taking note of promising gangs of mushrooms and fruiting berries. 

The heron spread its giant wings whenever the sun chose the stand of birches to warm. Afanasy made a toothpick and worked at his canines. Plyed's pupils constricted and dilated. The heron exploded to the top of a birch and exchanged ideas with another heron far hence. The bees appointed an ambassador to debrief Afanasy regarding some abandoned ermine traps they had discovered on the other side of the creek.

Afanasy set the sea monster down on the table and sized it up. Felt around in his leggings until he drew out a few dried smelt, two of which he sent arcing over Plyed's mug so that they neatly disappeared into his jaws, and one which he worked himself. 

Exactly one hour before sunset there came a pair of doves and an enormous iridescent moth the size of a raven. The doves hung in the air, hovering and speaking to one another at treetop level just outside the garden. The moth drifted across the clearing in slow arcs like a piece of paper falling from a great height, and settled restlessly on the table. The bees formed a reconnaissance party to confer with the moth. The doves departed, and a heap of quilts came humping across the clearing.

"Happy Birthday, Papa!" sang Afanasy to the shambling mound. "Let's take a bath!"

Bukol, the hermit, emerged from the quilts one at a time, leaving a trail of parti-colored felt and wool across the clearing. At last, as he approached the rotted table, he threw off the last quilt and threw his hands up, silently. He was a tiny creature, the size of a five-year-old boy, with matted locks of blond hair and garish ochre and canary-yellow face paint. He hobbled, keeling to one side, and rattled with animal bones as he lurched ahead. Mutely he embraced the giant at the table, and they remained in silence, arms locked around one another. while another rain shower clapped for them. 

The hermit then slowly drew a giant sleeve of pemmican from a pouch on his back, and placed it reverentially before the dozing bear, with a deep bow and a flourish of his arms.

He cupped his hands together for a full three or four minutes as bees took turns alighting on his hair, his arms, his fingertips, and clouded around his form.

"Let's get the bath going! My skin's a bit parched!" enthused Afanasy, getting up from the table. The sun was falling asleep in the west. The bats were emerging, curlicuing in the treetops.

Afanasy and Bukol left the garden through the stone wall, down a pine needle-strewn path through the thin woods, to an irregularly-shaped boulder next to a sleepy creek. The boulder was cracked from top to bottom so that a great blancmange like Afanasy could just extrude himself through the fissure and into an interior wood-lined, moss-floored tomb filled with steam. There was no light, but a wonderful heavy smell of boiled stones, sweet hay ferns, and pine pitch. Both of them shrugged off their clothes and used them to stuff the fissure closed, and found seats in the dark around the deep cellarhole where the echoing churning sounds of a distant boiling tidal pool began. 

The only visible feature were two fuming pinpoints of deep amber, the eyes of Khoshchei ever raging and gnashing his ivory teeth.

After an hour or two:

"Great to see you, Papa. You look sharp. The Lord has been good to you since I seen you last year."

Bukol responded with some low guttural rasps, like someone choking on a bone fragment. 

"No kidding! How long have you been in here, Yaga?"

"Since Shrovetide. I've not been feeling well." replied a low, honeyed woman's voice. "I'm surprised you came looking for me, Bukol."

"Don't flatter yourself, Yaga. This is Bukol's birthday and we're here as we are every year, celebrating the gift the good Lord gave us, of this handful of man. My dad."

"Happy Birthday, Bukol. Did you get the monkey fingers I left you?"

"Of course! His spells are just as good as yours, still, and none of them turned into flesh-eating monkey slaves at all. They're all collecting sap, living in trees behind the Kreml, working for Alnus."

"Pfeh."

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