It's dark, and something is squeezing me.
Not a strap. Not a hand. The whole world is squeezing me from every side at once, like a fist that wants me gone.
Then it lets go, and the cold hits.
Air. Real air. It rushes into my mouth and down into my chest, and my chest does something it hasn't done in a long time. It fills. All the way to the bottom.
I scream. I don't decide to. It just comes out of me, loud and thin and furious, and I can't stop it.
And I can hear it.
I can hear myself screaming. I have a mouth, and a voice comes out of it, and my ears catch the voice. After all that silence, it's the most beautiful ugly noise in the world.
Somewhere above me a woman laughs. "There he is. There's the voice."
I can hear her, too.
Then light. Too much of it. Yellow and smeared, like looking through a wet window. A shape leans over me. A big shape. Everything is big.
I can see. Badly. But I can see.
I try to lift an arm to cover my eyes. Old habit.
And the arm lifts.
I stop screaming.
I have an arm. I wave it. It's a floppy, useless thing and it goes nowhere I point it, but it moves, and it's mine. I find the other one. Also there. I kick, and two legs kick the air back.
I have hands. I have legs.
The last thing I remember is the dark, the strap across my forehead, and a voice offering me a new world, from the beginning.
I thought "from the beginning" was a figure of speech.
A finger comes down from the sky. It's the size of a sausage, a proper village sausage, and it pokes me in the belly.
"He's thinking," says the owner of the finger. "Look at that face. Like a tax clerk."
When you don't know what's going on, you report what you do know. They beat that into us at the front.
Sitrep. Location: unknown. Hot, wet, smells of smoke and birch leaves. Personnel: two women, judging by the voices. Both giants. Weapons: none. Clothing: none. Own condition: four limbs, working, badly calibrated. Eyes: barely. Ears: working, but everything sounds like it's coming through a wall. Size: small.
My hand drifts in front of my face by accident. It's a red, wrinkled blur with five little peas on the end.
Conclusion: I'm a baby.
I wait for that to feel insane. It doesn't. After the crater, after the hospital, after the voice, "I'm a baby" is honestly not the strangest report I've ever filed.
Everything else comes in pieces. Shapes without edges. Voices without directions. Too many smells. My head is twenty-three years old, but it's been plugged into equipment that was switched on five minutes ago, and none of the equipment works yet.
The smoke and the birch leaves. It's a banya, a bathhouse. Grandpa had one at his dacha, a little black one that made your eyes water. This one is darker and hotter, and the only light is one small blur of flame somewhere near the floor.
The older giant wipes me down with something rough and puts me on a soft, damp chest. My mother's. It has to be. Her heart is thumping under my ear, fast, like she's run a long way.
They talk over my head. It's Russian. Plain Russian, with round, heavy o's, the way my great-grandmother spoke. I understand every word. That's one good thing today.
"Dasha," the old one says, and her voice changes. "You're bleeding too much."
"I know."
"Lie still. I'll send for—"
"Matryona. Get me my bag. The green one."
"You're in no state for that."
"I did this in the rain once, with arrows going over my head. Give me the bag."
So the old one is Matryona. The midwife, from the way she handles me, like a woman who has caught a thousand babies and dropped none.
Arrows, though. I file that away. Maybe it's a village expression.
Something rustles. A bitter, green smell of crushed leaves. My mother chews. I can feel her jaw working against the top of my head. She shifts me higher on her chest, and one arm moves away, down low.
Dasha pressed her palm flat on her belly and shut her eyes. The yarrow was in her mouth to help the work along; the rest she had to do herself. It was healer's work, the oldest kind: mana, shaped by everything she knew about a woman's body, pushed into the places that were torn. Most of it came out as heat. Under her hand, deep inside, the bleeding slowed, then stopped. Matryona the midwife had done small versions of this all her life, and she still held her breath while she watched.
Under me, my mother's skin is getting warm. Then hot, like a glass of tea you can't hold any more. I don't know where it's coming from. Skin doesn't do that. Fevers don't come on in ten seconds.
Then it's over. My mother lets out a long breath and goes slack under me. Her skin was hot a second ago. Now it's clammy, and she's shivering.
"Well?" she says, very quietly.
The midwife checks something. She makes a small, surprised grunt.
"Stopped. Glory to God."
"Glory to God, and to yarrow, and to me," says my mother. "I want some credit."
"You'll get a slap, is what you'll get. Look at you, you've gone blue. Here. Eat this."
"I'm not hungry."
"Eat it, or I'll tell Stepan what you just did."
My mother eats.
I lie on her chest and listen to her crunch, and I try to put it all into a report. I can't. Some leaves. Heat that came from nowhere. The bleeding stopped.
Maybe I imagined it. Babies probably imagine things all the time.
Next comes the swaddling, and nobody asks my opinion.
The midwife lays me on a strip of cloth. Arms down at my sides. Legs pulled straight. Then she wraps. And wraps. And wraps again, and ties a band around the whole thing, tight.
I've been turned into a doner kebab. A glorious one, rolled tight, with nothing sticking out but the face.
I fight it. Of course I fight it.
The last bed I lay in, I couldn't move anything. No arms. No legs. A strap across my forehead. Every night I asked to be let out of that body.
Somebody let me out. New body, four limbs, all in working order. I've had them for about an hour.
And the first thing this world does is tie them down.
If it's a joke, somebody up there has a very dry sense of humour. I'd laugh, if this body could do anything except scream. So I scream. I go red. I give it my whole tiny chest.
My mother speaks from the bench, slow and tired.
"Tighter, Matryona. He's got his father's shoulders."
"I'm doing it tight."
"Kolya—" she starts, then stops herself and laughs. "No, not yet. Little one. I've stitched up grown men who made less fuss than you."
None of it helps. The band stays tight, and my screaming runs out of steam anyway. Worse, the tightness starts to feel like being held, all over, all the time. My eyes get heavy against orders.
A prisoner again. A warm one, this time, and well fed. But a prisoner.
I hate that it works.
Then the midwife opens the door.
The cold that comes in is a cold I know. Trench cold. January cold. The kind that finds the gap in your collar and moves in. My face is the only part of me outside the wrapping, and it gets the full report. Minus twenty, maybe worse. Wind, and dry snow blowing off the roofs.
Verdict: no.
I say so, loudly. Nobody listens. They throw a sheepskin over me. The midwife tucks me under one arm like a loaf of bread, gives my mother the other, and the three of us go out into the dark.
Then warmth, and a door banging shut behind us, and a smell like a wall: smoke, sour cabbage, sheep, and people. Mostly people.
Two voices come from somewhere high up.
"Is it a boy?"
"Can I hold him?"
"No," say three adults at once.
The izba, the family's log house, was a single room built around a big white stove. On top of the stove, where it was warmest, two children lay on their stomachs and looked down at the new baby: Masha, who was nine and serious, and Fedya, who was six and wasn't.
"Masha. Fedya. Down, and let the midwife by," says an old, dry voice.
So I have a sister and a brother. I can't see them yet. I can hear them breathing on top of the stove, very carefully, the way kids breathe when they're trying to be invisible so nobody sends them to bed.
My father arrives with the cold.
The door bangs, a draught of frost rolls across the floor, and something enormous comes in stamping snow off its boots. It smells of coal and iron and sweat. I can't see much past the end of my own nose, but I can tell he's big, because the light from the flame in the corner goes away when he stands in front of it.
"Stepan," says the old, dry voice from beside the stove. My grandmother, I guess. "Hands. You're black to the elbow."
He washes. It takes a while.
Then he comes over, and the midwife hands me up to him.
He holds me in two hands, out in front of him, arms stiff. Like a horseshoe just out of the fire. Like I might burn him, or he might crush me, and he hasn't decided which is worse.
"Closer," says Grandma. "He won't bite. He's got no teeth."
"He's so small."
"They're all small. You were small."
"Was I?"
"No. You were enormous. I'm still angry about it."
Slowly, very carefully, he brings me in. A beard scratches my face. He looks at me for a long time. I look back, or try to. His face is a warm blur with two dark spots for eyes.
"Hello, son," he says. Quietly, like it's a secret between us.
It's two words. I didn't know two words could hit that hard.
They don't put me in a bed. They hang me from the ceiling.
I find that out the way I find out everything now: by feel. A shallow basket under my back. A little mattress that crackles like straw, because it is straw. Ropes creaking somewhere above my head.
When Grandma lets go, the whole thing drops a little, bounces, and bobs.
I bob.
Every time someone walks across the floor, I bob. When the stove door opens, I bob. When Fedya shifts on the stove in his sleep, I'm fairly sure I bob.
I've felt this before. Summer, a lake, Grandpa's old rod, a red-and-white float riding the little waves. I'm the float now. Somewhere up there, some big fish is thinking about me.
Night comes. Everybody lies down wherever they fit: the stove, the benches, the shelf by the ceiling. Somebody pinches out the light. Only the little red flame in the corner stays.
Then the snoring starts.
My father snores like the bellows of a forge, in and out, very steady. Grandma whistles through her nose. Fedya mumbles in his sleep.
I can't sleep. My body wants to. My head won't let it.
So I do what I used to do on night watch, to stay sane. I recite something. The periodic table, because why not.
Hydrogen, one. Helium, two. Lithium, three.
It comes. All of it. In order. Every element, every number, every atomic mass down to the decimals. Potassium, nineteen, thirty-nine point zero nine eight.
I stop.
That isn't the strange part. I always knew the table. I was the best in my year. I could recite it for a bet, and I usually won the bet.
The strange part is that I'm not remembering a list. I'm remembering the poster. The one on the wall at the back of the lecture hall at the polytechnic. I can see the coffee stain over Scandium. I can see the corner torn off near the noble gases, and the bit of tape someone used to fix it, gone yellow.
I sat in that hall for a year and a half and never once looked at that tape.
Now I can count the creases in it.
My eyes can't see the end of my own arm, and my memory can count creases in a piece of tape from another life. Somebody has wired this body in a very strange order.
I try something else. Grandma's kitchen table, in my old life. The oilcloth. Red cherries on a white background, in bunches of three. A burn mark near the edge where she once put down a hot pan. The phone number of a girl from my first year. All the words of the oath. The song that was playing in the shop where I bought my last cigarettes.
It's all there. Every book on every shelf, dusted.
It should feel like a gift. Mostly it feels like someone has been inside my head, tidying up.
And the crater is there too. Perfect. The smell of the earth. The buzz.
I close that shelf. Some books you don't need to read twice.
Later, when it's very dark, someone gets up.
Slow steps. Bare feet on the boards. A shape leans over my basket and stops very close. Warm breath on my face. It's my mother. She has her ear right beside my nose, and she's holding her own breath so she can hear mine.
I breathe, to be helpful.
"Dasha." My father's voice from the bench, thick with sleep. "Lie down."
"In a minute."
"You did this with Mitya, too. Every night, for a month."
"And Mitya breathed like a little piglet."
A pause. Then my father laughs, very softly, into the dark.
"Like a piglet with a cold."
"Exactly like that."
She stays a little longer anyway. Then the steps go back, and the bench creaks.
Mitya. I keep the name. I haven't heard a Mitya in this house. They said the name the way you talk about someone who isn't here any more, but they smiled when they said it.
In the morning, I go to war.
The enemy is my grandmother.
It starts with chewing. Close to my ear, slow and wet. Grandma is chewing something, and she's doing it with very few teeth. Then a pause, a twist of cloth, the snap of a thread, and something comes for me. A soska, she calls it. A soother.
Round one. The thing touches my lips. I spit it out. Point to me.
Round two. I turn my head away. It follows. I turn the other way. It follows that way too. Draw.
Round three. I scream in protest. Big mistake. You never open your mouth in front of the enemy. In it goes.
Round four. It's warm. It's a little sweet. I'm very, very hungry.
I lose round four.
Weeks later, when my eyes work, I'll find out what was in it: black bread, chewed by Grandma's three remaining teeth and wrapped in a rag. I'm glad I didn't know at the time.
Grandma sounds deeply satisfied.
"Look at him fight," she says. "Good. The stubborn ones live."
Later my mother takes me and feeds me properly. I'm not going to describe that. A man has his dignity, even at one day old. I'll only say that it beats the rag.
Masha sits by my basket for most of the morning. She's nine and she has decided that I'm her job. She rocks the basket and talks to me like I'm a colleague.
"Tomorrow you're going to church," she says. "Mama can't come. She's not allowed in for forty days, because of having you. So I'll be there instead."
That seems fair. Somebody should keep an eye on me.
"Uncle Gavrila is going to be your godfather. He's got a scar from his eyebrow all the way down to here." I can't see where "here" is. Somewhere impressive, from her voice. "I asked him what did it, and he said, 'A wolf.' And Mama said, 'A wolf with a sword.' And then they both laughed for ages and didn't explain."
A wolf with a sword. I put that next to the arrows.
"He's coming with his dogs tomorrow. They're bigger than our cow."
Kids exaggerate. I was a kid once.
"He runs the guild hall in the village. Where the adventurers come."
Adventurers. The word sounds like something from my little cousin's phone games. It must mean something else here. Traders, maybe. Hunters.
"And your name's going to be Nikolay," Masha says. "Papa wanted Stepan, but Mama said one Stepan is plenty for any house. Father Ivan says Saint Nikolay's day is in a few days, so that's lucky. Saint Nikolay helps people who are in trouble."
I stop sucking on the rag.
A paper icon, the size of a playing card, wrapped in tape against the rain. He was in my hands when it happened. The saint I thanked from the bottom of a hole in the ground. The one I decided had heard me.
Nikolay.
All right. Fine. Message received.
Fedya's voice arrives over the edge of the basket.
"Why's he making that face?"
Masha answers with the confidence of an expert.
"That's his poo face."
She's right.
The next day I get baptised, and the first thing I learn about church is that you go there by sleigh.
They dress me in a white shirt that scratches. Homespun linen: somebody grew it, spun it, wove it and sewed it, all by hand, and I can feel every single step. They swaddle me again: same doner, new wrapper. They wrap that in a shawl and the shawl in a sheepskin. By the end I'm a small, angry onion with a face.
My mother can't come. Forty days, Masha said. I hear her voice from the doorway, and then she's close, and she kisses my forehead, the only part of me they've left out, and tucks the sheepskin tighter.
"Bring him back," she tells my father.
"It's a church, Dasha. Not a war."
"Bring him back anyway."
Then the bells arrive.
Not church bells. Sleigh bells, a whole harness of them, coming down the street at a speed that makes every dog in the village lose its mind. Something big pants outside the gate. Several big somethings. A voice like a barrel rolling down stairs shouts:
"WHERE IS HE? WHERE'S MY GODSON?"
"Not so loud!" Grandma shouts back, louder. "He's two days old!"
"Then he'd better get used to me!"
The guild master of the village was a wide man in a wolfskin coat that made him wider. He had a grey beard, a red face, and a long pale scar running from his eyebrow down across his cheek, and he had never been quiet for a single minute of his life.
He smells of tobacco and wet dog, and of something else I can't name, sharp and clean, like the air after a thunderstorm. His breath is warm on my face.
"Well, well," says Uncle Gavrila. "Look at you. Handsome! Your mother's eyes, your father's chin. The girls in this village are going to—"
"Don't say it out loud!" Grandma spits three times over her shoulder. "You'll put the eye on him."
"Me?"
"You."
Handsome. I'll take it. Two days old, and already the best review I've had in years.
He takes me from my father without asking. He isn't scared of me at all. He holds me in the crook of one arm, easy and careless, the way an old soldier holds a rifle he's carried for twenty years. I decide I like him. I don't have a lot of choice.
Masha was right about the dogs.
I can't see them. I don't need to. Outside the gate, four sets of lungs are breathing, and every one of them is bigger than my father's.
There were four of them, harnessed in pairs in front of a long, low sleigh: grey, shaggy, and each the size of a young bull calf. Their heads came up to Gavrila's chest. They came from an old northern breed with a little mana in the blood, the kind guild masters liked, because they could run all day and still be dogs at the end of it. In that cold their breath made no cloud at all, only a faint shimmer, like the air over a road in summer. The frost that had settled on everything else (the fence, the gate, Gavrila's beard) had not settled on a single hair of them.
"This is Buran," says Gavrila. "He says hello."
Something wet and warm and roughly the size of my whole head snuffles at my face. Then it sneezes on me.
It's warm.
It takes a long time to get through the village. That's how I know it isn't a small one. Dogs bark at us from yard after yard, then go very quiet as we pass. People shout from gates.
"Stepan! A boy?"
"A boy!"
"Good! Another pair of hands!"
"Don't drown him, Father Ivan!"
The dogs don't trot. They run, flat out, and the sleigh flies. All I've got is a white blur, the hiss of the runners, the bells, and the scratch of Uncle Gavrila's beard, which has frost in it.
Matryona the midwife, who is going to be my godmother, sits next to us and talks the whole way. To Gavrila, to the dogs, to me, to the sky. When nobody answers, she answers herself. Every hundred metres, one of the things she says is "Slow down." He never does.
He didn't need to. Gavrila drove the way other people breathe, the reins in one hand and the baby in the other, hardly looking at the road. At the end of the street there was a sharp turn, and a narrow gap between a well and somebody's woodpile. He didn't slow down. He leaned, just a little, and the sleigh rose onto one runner, slid through the gap with a hand's width to spare on each side, and dropped back down without a bump.
Fedya, riding at the back and yelling with joy, lost his grip on the turn and went flying. For a moment he hung upside down in the air against the white sky.
Gavrila's free hand went back. Nobody saw it move. One moment it was on the reins; the next it was holding Fedya by the collar, a metre above the snow. He swung the boy back onto the seat and patted his head.
"Hold on with both hands, soldier."
"I was holding on with both hands!"
"Then grow a third."
I didn't see any of it. I felt it. The world tipped, there was a yell, a thump, and then Fedya complaining. And through all of it, the arm I'm lying in didn't so much as twitch.
I've known fast men. Lyokha could take the cigarette out of your mouth before you knew he was there. I've never known one who could catch a flying boy without moving his other arm.
Masha's voice, very stern, informs Fedya that she is holding his belt now, for the rest of the ride, and that's final.
I lie in the middle of all this noise and think: I'm going to church.
In my old life, church was the one place I was always sure of. I went every Sunday from the time I could walk. I knew the prayers before I knew my times tables. At the front I prayed every day, with the paper saint in my hands.
And somebody heard. I'm lying here in the proof.
So yes. I'm going to church. I owe somebody a thank-you.
The church is cold inside, colder than you'd think, and it smells of wax, smoke and old incense. Little points of light swim in the dark. Candles, I suppose.
Father Ivan has a thin old voice, and the tone of a man who has done this a thousand times. He probably has.
Then they unwrap me.
All of it. The sheepskin, the shawl, the swaddle, the scratchy shirt. The air in that church hits my bare skin and I let everyone know what I think of it.
"Good lungs," Gavrila says, delighted.
Father Ivan takes me in two old, dry hands, says something about the servant of God Nikolay, and puts me in the water.
Under. All the way.
The first time, I'm too shocked to do anything.
The second time, I try to scream underwater. That's a mistake.
The third time, I come up and tell the whole church exactly how I feel, at full volume, with water coming out of my nose.
"Listen to that!" says Gavrila, proud as a father. "A warrior's lungs!"
The deacon shushes him. Father Ivan doesn't even pause. He's heard worse.
They wrap me in a fresh cloth, and Father Ivan dips a little brush in oil and touches it to my forehead, my eyes, my ears, my chest, my hands, my feet. He murmurs the same words each time.
There was a little worked mana in that oil, as there was in most of what Father Ivan did with his hands: a small, plain blessing, warm as spring sun. He had given it so many times that he no longer felt it go. The deacon yawned, loudly enough to echo.
And I'm warm.
Not like the bathhouse. There it was my mother's skin, burning up under me. This is gentler, and it's everywhere the brush has touched.
Warm oil, I tell myself. They must have heated it on the stove. In a church this cold, they'd have to.
Except the oil was cold when it touched me. I felt that too.
Somebody yawns. Nobody else seems to have noticed a thing. So either everybody here is used to this, or I'm going mad.
I'm not sure which one I'd prefer.
Then something cold touches my head, and I hear scissors. Snip. Snip. Snip. Snip. Four little snips, in the shape of a cross.
Two days old, and I'm already paying tax. In hair.
Father Ivan rolled the cut hairs into a pellet of wax and dropped it into the font, and everyone leaned in to watch. Every peasant in that church knew what it meant if the wax sank. Stepan had stood at this font four times before.
The wax floated.
Everybody breathes out at once. I hear my father's breath go out of him, long and slow, like a man setting down something heavy.
I don't know what test I just passed. But I can hear in that breath that not everyone in this family has passed it.
On the way out, Father Ivan stops by the door, and I hear a pen scratch.
"Nikolay," he reads as he writes, "son of Stepan, of the estate of—" and a name I don't catch.
My first official document.
Before we leave, they carry me around to the icons. The midwife holds me up to each one, says a little prayer, and makes me kiss the glass. Well. She presses my face against it. Close enough.
At the third one she stops.
"And this is your saint," she tells me. "Nikolay the Wonderworker. Say hello."
I can't see him. Just a blur of gold, and somewhere in the middle of it, a dark shape.
I don't need to see him. I know that face. The high, bald forehead. The short white beard. The eyes looking a little to one side, as if he's listening for something far away.
We've been through a lot, him and me.
Hello, I think at him. Thanks for picking up.
He doesn't say anything. He never did.
Outside, Stepan stopped in the churchyard. Two little wooden crosses stood near the fence, side by side, with caps of snow on top. He brushed the snow off them with his glove. He didn't say anything. He just did it, carefully, the way he did everything.
Masha leans over me.
"That's Mitya," she says. "And that's Dunyasha. I'll tell you about them when you're bigger. Dunyasha used to bite."
My father laughs, a short, surprised laugh.
"She did," he says. "Like a little dog."
Then Gavrila whistles, and the dogs take us home.
It's getting dark by the time we leave the church. Even I can tell that much: the white blur goes blue, then grey.
Halfway home, something howls in the forest.
It's a long sound, and it rises at the end. Then another voice joins it, and another. All four dogs stop dead. Buran makes a noise low in his chest that I can feel through the floor of the sleigh.
Then the wind turns, and I smell smoke.
Not chimney smoke. We're out between the fields, and the nearest house is a long way behind us. It's the smell of a cold fire pit, of wet ash the morning after. It comes out of the forest on the wind, in the middle of winter, where nothing is burning.
Something heavy and iron scrapes across the floor of the sleigh. My father, moving his axe closer to his hand. Nobody has to explain that sound to me.
At the edge of the forest, three hundred metres off, the ash wolves stood among the birches and watched the sleigh. In the dusk they were hard to tell from the trees: long grey shapes, the colour of a dead fire, with a faint haze rising off their backs like the last smoke from embers. Their eyes caught the last of the light and held it, dull red. Where they had walked, the snow was grey.
Gavrila says one word to the dogs. It's quiet, and I don't catch it. All four of them stop growling at once, as if he's switched them off.
"Ash wolves," says Gavrila. He doesn't sound worried. He sounds like a man reading the weather. "Early this year."
"The Kuzmins next door lost a sheep," says my father.
"I heard."
Gavrila clicks his tongue, and the dogs move on. Nobody talks for a while after that. Even Fedya is quiet.
Ash wolves. I know wolves; we had them in the forests outside the city. I don't know what ash has to do with it, and with my eyes the way they are, I can't go and look.
I put it on the shelf next to the arrows and the wolf with the sword. The shelf is filling up.
At home, the neighbours come in for a small, poor party. I can't see any of it, but I can hear it and smell it: wet coats, onions, and somebody's bottle.
First, Matryona the midwife brings out a pot of porridge and gives my father the first spoonful. The room goes quiet. Then a sound comes out of my father that I've never heard a grown man make: a cough, a choke and a groan, all at once.
"Horseradish," Grandma explains to the room. "And salt, and pepper, and whatever else Matryona could find. So he knows what it cost her."
"I know what it cost," says my father, when he can talk again, and asks for water. On the bench, my mother laughs so hard the bench creaks.
Then somebody breaks the pot, and everybody throws a coin into the pieces for the midwife.
After that, Uncle Gavrila hands out presents.
The first is for me. A knife, from what everybody says next.
"Every man needs a knife," Gavrila says, and tries to put it in the cradle.
Grandma catches his wrist in mid-air. I hear the slap. For an old woman, she's fast.
"He can't hold up his own head, Gavrila."
"He's got time."
My mother takes the knife and puts it up on the highest shelf in the house.
"When he's fourteen," she says.
"Twelve."
"Fourteen."
The second present is for the family. Something wrapped in paper. Grandma sniffs it, and her voice changes.
"Tea," she says. "Real tea."
"From the fair."
"Gavrila, you fool. What did this cost you?"
"Don't ask."
Grandma wraps it in a clean cloth and puts it in the chest, right at the bottom. I hear the lid close, very gently.
"For Easter," she announces. "And not one leaf before."
Eighth-grade history textbook, page 143, bottom left: a merchant family round a samovar, and a caption saying that a hundred and fifty years ago, tea was a luxury for the well-off. I can see the page. Somebody had drawn a moustache on the merchant's wife. In this house, tea goes in the chest, wrapped up like a treasure, and waits for Easter.
Later, when the neighbours are loud and the bottle has gone around twice, Gavrila goes and sits next to my mother on the bench by the stove. My cradle is right above them. I bob a little as he sits down.
For a while they just sit there.
"Matryona told me," he says quietly. "About the bathhouse."
"Matryona talks too much."
"Dasha."
"I was bleeding. What was I supposed to do? Ask it nicely to stop?"
"You were always like that." He smiles a little; I can hear it. "Even back then. Even with—"
He stops.
They both looked at the same spot on the floor, between their boots, as if something was lying there that only the two of them could see.
The silence goes on. At the front, men went quiet like that when somebody said the name of a unit that didn't exist any more.
"It wasn't your fault," says Gavrila.
My mother doesn't answer for a moment. Then I hear a bowl scrape on the bench.
"Eat something, Gavrila."
He eats. Neither of them says anything else about it.
That night, after the guests have gone, Grandma ties something to the rope of my cradle. I feel the basket tremble, and I hear her muttering under her breath.
"Heavy eye, that man," she says. "Kind heart. Heavy eye."
It was a red woollen thread, and the knot was one her own grandmother had taught her. Charms like it were older than the church in that village, and a few of them still worked. This was one of those.
"Mama," my mother says from the bench. "He was baptised this morning. He's got a godfather, a godmother and a saint."
"Saints are busy," says Grandma. "A thread is always there."
Masha's voice comes down from the stove.
"Grandma, how did Mama come to live with us?"
My mother sighs. "Masha. Go to sleep."
But Grandma is already settling in. She's an old woman with a story and an audience, and nothing is going to stop her.
"Your mother," she says, "came back from that business of hers all alone, with nothing in her bag but debts. Debts bigger than she was. And the barin paid them. Every coin."
"Why?" asks Masha.
"A healer is a useful thing to own. The master has gout, and a houseful of children who catch every fever going." Grandma sniffs. "And your mother was the prettiest thing this district had ever—"
"Mama."
My mother doesn't raise her voice. She just says it, once. Grandma stops.
Nobody says anything.
Dasha was looking at the wall. Not at anyone; just at the wall, the way she and Gavrila had looked at the floor. At the table, Stepan was mending a harness strap. His hands stopped. One of them closed, slowly, and then, just as slowly, opened again.
Grandma clears her throat. When she goes on, her voice is lighter. A little too light.
"So she was written down as his. And then he let her marry my Stepan, thank God for that. Otherwise Stepan would still be single and stinking of coal."
"He still stinks of coal," says my mother. Her voice comes back from wherever it went.
"Yes, but now it's your problem."
"Mama, why are you telling the children this?"
"The children knew already. This one didn't."
My mother laughs despite herself, and something soft hits Grandma. A rag, I think.
I lie in my basket and turn it over.
I don't know what happened in the master's house. Nobody is going to explain it to a baby. But I know what a room sounds like when everybody in it has agreed not to say something. I've been in rooms like that.
Debts. A barin.
Every kid in Russia knows that word from school: Pushkin, Turgenev, the books you read the night before the exam. I read them fast, so I could get back to chemistry. A barin is a master. The landlord. The man who owns the land.
And the people on it.
Written down as his.
Sleighs. Dogs from a breed nobody remembers. No electric light anywhere. A master who owns people, and keeps the useful ones.
The voice said a new world. I'm starting to think it meant an old one.
The days start running together. And slowly, my eyes start to work.
It happens a little more every day. The blur at the end of my nose moves further away. Shapes get edges. Voices get faces. In the third week I wake up one morning, look up, and see the ceiling. Actually see it: the beams, the soot, and a spider who has clearly lived there longer than I have.
So I finally get a proper look at the house.
It's one room. I keep waiting for the rest of it. There is no rest of it. A huge white stove, benches along the walls, a table, the sleeping shelf up near the ceiling, and in the far corner, high up, the little flame in red glass in front of a dark painted face. That's all. No chairs, no cupboard, no bed. No light switch, no socket; I check the walls for one, out of habit.
Primitive, says the part of me that grew up with a fridge. But the table is one slab of wood as thick as a man's arm, scrubbed almost white. It will still be standing long after every flat-pack cupboard in my old flat has gone to the dump.
And the stove I respect straight away. It's the size of a small car, and the whole house is arranged around it, the way a church is arranged around its altar. It's warm. I forgive the house everything else.
My cradle hangs from the end of a long wooden pole fixed to a beam overhead, bending down like a fishing rod. Which explains a lot about the bobbing.
Then I get a look at my family.
Masha and Fedya wear the same long shirts of rough grey cloth, down to their knees and tied at the waist with a cord. Fedya's sleeves are rolled up four times. That shirt was clearly Masha's first, and somebody else's before that. In my old life, a shop in the city centre would sell a shirt like that as "eco-linen, hand-woven", for a month's wages. Here it's just what's left after your sister.
Grandma is small and quick, in a long dark pinafore dress, a sarafan, with her headscarf knotted under her chin so tightly I worry about her blood supply.
My father's feet are wrapped up to the knee in strips of cloth, and over the cloth he wears shoes woven out of tree bark, like two little baskets. A grown man. A blacksmith. In basket shoes.
I decide not to judge. I'm currently wearing a tablecloth.
Light, at night, comes from a splinter of wood clamped in an iron holder over a tub of water. It burns for a few minutes, then it's gone, and someone has to light the next one from the last. That's Fedya's job. He takes it very seriously. He also falls asleep at it, and the house goes dark, and Grandma says something about him that I won't repeat.
Uncle Gavrila comes by one afternoon with his dogs, and Masha carries me out to the gate. This time I can see them.
They're exactly as big as everybody said. That isn't the strange part.
The strange part is the breath. At minus twenty, everything warm breathes smoke. Horses, men, me. That isn't an opinion; it's what warm, wet air does when it meets the cold. Gavrila's beard is steaming. Masha is steaming. The dogs aren't. Not a wisp.
On the day of the baptism I could blame my eyes. My eyes are fine now. I've got nothing left to blame.
Once, a sleigh goes past on the road, pulled by three black horses with silver bells, with a painted crest on its door. The master's, Masha whispers. Everybody goes to the window to look. Everybody except my mother.
Some nights the ash wolves sing down by the mill. When they do, my mother gets up, goes to the window, and stands there until they stop.
Now that the world outside has stopped being a blur, I start to notice the world inside.
It happens at night, when the house is quiet. My heartbeat, fast and light, a baby's heart going like a sewing machine. And underneath it, very faint, something else.
It isn't a beat. It's more like a hum. Slow and steady, somewhere under my ribs, the way the fridge sounds from the next room when everything else is silent. Maybe it's been there all along, and only now are my senses good enough to catch it.
I hold my breath to listen. My heart speeds up. The hum doesn't.
It's not my heartbeat. It's not my breathing. It's not anything I learned in biology.
Naturally, I try to move it. I'm a soldier. When I find something, I give it orders.
I concentrate the way I used to concentrate in exams. Nothing. I concentrate harder. I squeeze everything I've got.
Something moves. Unfortunately, it isn't the hum.
Grandma gets up, sniffs the air, and changes me without a word. The experiment is postponed until further notice.
Christmas comes, and with it Svyatki, the holy days. And with the holy days, a goat walks into the house on its back legs.
I'm half asleep when the door bangs open. Cold air. Laughter. Singing. A crowd of people pours in, and in front of them is a goat as tall as a man, in a sheepskin turned inside out, with horns and a wooden face, and it comes straight for my cradle and leans over me and goes MEHHH.
I scream.
Of course I scream. I spent eight months learning that if something leans over you and makes a noise, you're about to die.
The goat takes its head off. Underneath is a boy of about sixteen with red cheeks, laughing his own head off.
"It's only me, little brother! It's only Petka from next door!"
Behind him come a bear made of two sheepskins, a big man in his wife's dress and headscarf, and a crowd of children singing kolyadki, the Christmas carols, at the top of their voices. Grandma hands out little baked cows and goats from a basket, and the singing gets louder. One of the children carries a big paper star on a stick, lit from inside. The light in it is white, almost blue, and it doesn't flicker at all.
"The Kuzmins have got their little stone out," says Grandma. "Once a year, they take it out."
The Kuzmins are our neighbours, the family over the fence. Petka the goat is their eldest.
I stare at the star until they take it away. I've never seen a candle burn like that.
"You'll get used to it," my mother says. "It's Christmas. They do this for two weeks."
Two weeks. Two weeks of goats.
My mother isn't joking. For two weeks the village goes from house to house in masks, singing and eating whatever it has saved for the holidays. At night the older girls sit up telling fortunes with melted wax and a mirror, to see who they'll marry. Masha begs to go every night, and every night she's told she's too young.
After Christmas the frost gets worse, and the warmest place in the village is my father's forge.
So that's where Masha takes me.
She has chores there: sweeping, carrying, fetching water and freezing her hands in it. She brings me along on her back, wrapped in a shawl and tied to her like a sack of flour. Fedya comes too, because Fedya goes wherever anything interesting is happening.
The forge is a low, black building at the end of our yard. Inside, it's hot and dark and full of the smell of coal. There's a fire in the middle that my father feeds with a big leather bellows, and when he pumps it the fire goes from red to orange to almost white, and sparks jump up into the dark.
I like it. I don't know why. Maybe it's just the heat.
On the wall above the anvil hangs an old axe head with no handle. Every other piece of iron in here is black, or rusty, or both. This one is grey and clean, and there are marks cut into its side, small and neat, in rows. The door stands open half the morning to let the smoke out, and the frost creeps in along the floor and up the tools. It never touches that axe head.
"That's Papa's first one," says Fedya, when he sees where I'm looking. "From before he married Mama. It never rusts. Ever. I licked it once to check."
"And his tongue didn't freeze to it," says Masha, "which is the only reason we still have Fedya."
She holds me up so I can see it properly. I study the marks.
Iron rusts. In a damp, smoky forge, it rusts faster. That isn't an opinion; I spent a whole semester watching it happen. Every other piece of iron in this room agrees with me. This one doesn't.
Then my eyes get tired, and the axe goes blurry, the way things still do when I've been looking too long.
My father works without talking much. He heats a piece of iron until it glows, puts it on the anvil, and hits it. Tang. Tang. Tang-tang-tang. For a second, in the rhythm, I hear letters. Short, short, short. Grandpa's spoon on the kitchen table.
Then it's just a hammer.
Fedya sits down next to me on a pile of sacks, where Masha has put me so she can work. He looks around to make sure nobody's listening. Then he leans in close.
"I'll tell you a secret," he whispers. "But you can't tell Mama."
I can't tell anyone anything. I don't say so.
"I ate the honey. The honey in the little pot. All of it." He looks very serious. "Grandma thinks it was a mouse."
I look at him. He looks at me. He seems satisfied that I'll keep quiet. He's right.
"And I'll tell you another one." Now his whisper gets even smaller. "Papa can make iron do things. Not this iron. Special iron. And Mama can do magic. Real magic. When Uncle Yegor, Petka's papa, cut his leg with a scythe, she put her hand on it, and it closed. Like this." He claps his hands together. "Like a mouth."
"It did not close like a mouth," says Masha from across the forge. "It closed slowly, and then Mama was sick in the bucket."
"It closed like a slow mouth."
"And you're not supposed to talk about it."
"Why not?"
"Because if people know, they'll all come and ask, and Mama gets tired." Masha leans on her broom. "And because when the master's house needs her, they send a sleigh for her. They don't like her wasting it on us. That's why."
Fedya ignores that. He turns back to me.
"When I'm big," he says, "I'm going to do magic too."
"You have to understand things first," says Masha. "Mama said. You don't even understand the stove."
"Nobody understands the stove."
"And if you do too much, it makes you funny," Masha says. "That's why Mama doesn't do it much."
"Funny how?"
"Like Matryona the midwife."
Fedya thinks about the midwife. "She talks a lot."
"She always talked a lot. Mama says now she can't stop."
I lie on my sacks and listen.
Magic.
In my old life, if a kid had said that to me, I'd have smiled and nodded. When I was six I believed that Ded Moroz, Grandfather Frost, brought the presents, and that a grandfather lived in the boiler room of our building.
I'm not smiling now. I've just spent the morning looking at an axe head that won't rust, three steps from a forge full of rust. And Masha didn't say it like a story. She said it the way you'd talk about the water bucket. Like a chore. Something that makes Mama tired, and the midwife chatty.
So I stop arguing with it. Something is real here that wasn't real at home. And nobody here is amazed by it, or scared of it. They've lived with it so long it's part of the furniture, like the stove. They use it, it costs them, and they grumble about the cost, the way you'd grumble about firewood.
Everybody in this forge takes magic for granted. Everybody except the baby on the flour sacks.
That's a lot for one morning. So I go to sleep. Babies are allowed to.
In the evening, the whole family eats together.
There's one big bowl in the middle of the table, and everybody eats from it with their own wooden spoon. Father first, then everyone else, in order. You don't reach in before your turn. Fedya tried that once while I was watching, and got a spoon across the knuckles from Grandma so fast I didn't see it move.
Every spoon has a little notch cut near the end so you know whose it is. There are five spoons at the table.
There's a sixth one on the shelf behind the stove. It's small, and it has its notch, and nobody uses it. Masha dusts it on Saturdays.
They say a prayer, and they eat.
Tonight it's cabbage soup, bread, and kvass, the sour drink they make from old bread. Last night it was cabbage soup and bread. The night before, it was bread and cabbage soup.
I watch the spoons go in and out and look for something in that bowl. A bit of meat. An egg. A piece of fish, a slice of fat, anything. There isn't any. My father swings a hammer all day on cabbage. In the army we complained about the canteen at every meal. I'd like to apologise to the canteen.
I'm not even eating it. I'm on milk and a rag. But somebody in this family has to say it: there's no protein in this house.
For a while there's just the sound of spoons.
Then my father says, "A guild lad came to the forge today. After you went home."
My mother looks up. "Which one?"
"The Lapin boy. The tall one."
"He's a child. He's what, fifteen?"
"He's got the badge."
"So did I, at sixteen," says my mother. "Look how I turned out."
Badge. Guild. Lad. I listen harder.
"The ash wolves came down by the mill again," my father says. "The Kuzmins have lost two sheep now. The master's put money on them through the guild. A rouble a pelt."
"A rouble!" says Grandma. "For a wolf! For a rouble I'd go myself."
"Me too!" says my brother Fedya.
"The Lapin boy wants six spearheads," my father goes on. "With the bite rune. So they'll go through the coat."
Rune.
Old Viking letters, scratched on stones. I've seen them behind glass on a school trip, and glowing on swords in my cousin's phone games.
But my father says it slowly and carefully, the way he talks about tempering. Part of the job. A mark you cut into iron, so the iron does something it can't do by itself. And I've already seen one that works: the axe head on the forge wall, with its neat little rows of marks, that the frost never touches.
So that's what those marks are. Not decoration. Runes. Here they belong to magic the way a fuse belongs to a shell. Nobody at this table thinks that's strange.
Which sends me back through my memory. Was there anything written over me, the night I was born? Over the bathhouse door, on the cloth they wrapped me in? I couldn't see a thing then. I only had my ears.
And Father Ivan, at the font. He drew on me with oil: forehead, eyes, ears, chest, hands, feet. It's the same rite as in my old church. There, the priest draws a cross with the chrism, and that's all there is to it. Here the oil went warm. I never saw his brush. Was it only crosses he drew on me? Or something else as well?
"The bite rune," says my mother. "On six heads? That's—"
"Three nights each. Two, if I hurry."
"You don't hurry runes."
"I don't hurry runes," my father agrees.
"And the mana? You'll be grey for a month."
"I'll eat more."
"On what?" says Grandma.
Mana.
My cousin's games had that too. A blue bar in the corner of the screen that ran out if you cast too much.
But my father isn't talking about a bar on a screen. He's talking about something inside him. He spends it a little at a time, night after night, cutting marks into iron, and when it's gone he's grey for a month. And he gets it back by eating.
So where does it come from? From food? I'll eat more, he said, and Grandma said, On what? In this house, that's a real question. From the body? Then why did Masha say that too much of it makes you funny? And if a rune needs it to work, where does the axe head get its share, all these years later, hanging on the wall?
I don't know. I don't even know the right questions yet. But I know a cost when I hear one. My whole family just did the sums round one bowl of cabbage soup.
"He pays in coin," my father says. "Half now."
Nobody says anything for a moment. Even I know what that means. Coin is rare in this house.
"Coin is good," my mother says finally.
But she's gone quiet. She's looking down into the bowl, not eating.
"Tell the Lapin boy not to go alone," she says. "Tell him to go with Gavrila's people."
"I told him. He says he's going with old Grom's lot."
"Grom? Grom must be sixty."
"A hundred and ninety, he told me. That's young, for a dwarf."
A hundred and ninety.
I wait for somebody to laugh. Nobody does. My mother doesn't say Stepan, stop it. Grandma doesn't snort. They let it go past, as if he'd said that Grom came from the next village.
Dwarf. He said it the way you'd say Tatar, or Finn. A kind of people.
Maybe it's a nickname. Maybe Grom is just short, and old, and lies about his age. Maybe.
Or maybe magic isn't the only thing this world has that mine didn't. Maybe not everybody in it is human.
"Tell him again," my mother says. "Gavrila's people."
Her voice is flat. Completely flat, like the voice you use to read out a list. I know that voice. I've used it. And I've heard it in this house before: on the bench, the night of the party, when Gavrila said "Even with—" and stopped.
My father puts his big black hand over hers on the table and leaves it there.
Then Fedya puts down his spoon.
"When I'm fourteen," he announces, "I'm going to kill all the ash wolves. With Papa's spears. A rouble a pelt!"
"Good," says Grandma, without looking up. "The first rouble comes to me."
"Why you?"
"For the honey."
Fedya goes very still. His spoon stops halfway to his mouth.
"What honey? The mouse ate the honey."
"Then the mouse can pay me back," says Grandma. "A rouble a pelt. I'll wait."
Masha puts her head down on the table. My father's shoulders start to shake. And my mother looks at Fedya, at the guilt spread all over his face, and laughs until she has to wipe her eyes. The flat voice is gone as if it was never there.
Later, in the dark, I lie in my basket and do what I always do now. I go through the shelves.
In my old life, kids said magic and the grown-ups smiled. Here the grown-ups say it, and nobody smiles. My father and mother just talked about runes and mana the way they talk about rye and the tax. Not like a story. Like work. Like something that costs you nights and leaves you grey.
And then there's the rest. My mother's skin, burning hot for ten seconds, then cold. Church oil that was cold when it touched me and warm a moment later. Dogs that don't breathe smoke. An axe head that won't rust. A star that burns without a flicker. A man who is young at a hundred and ninety. And the hum under my ribs, which doesn't do anything at all, and won't take a single order from me.
A month ago I could blame my eyes for all of it. My eyes are fine now, and the list only gets longer.
So I do it properly, the way I was taught. Collect the data. Then find the simplest explanation that covers all of it.
A fever dream? A dream doesn't keep accounts. This house keeps accounts down to the kopeck.
Old Russia, and a lot of village superstition? Superstition doesn't stop iron from rusting.
Some science I never heard of? Maybe. But then it's a science nobody at my university knew, and here every six-year-old knows it.
That leaves one explanation. It covers everything on the list. I don't like it. It sounds like my cousin's phone games. It sounds like what a man says to a doctor just before the doctor starts writing.
I put all of it on one shelf, together. And this time I write a label on it.
MAGIC.
And underneath, smaller, because I'm still a chemist: Mechanism unknown.
The steward comes in the second week after Christmas.
We know he's coming because Fedya runs into the house without closing the door, red in the face, shouting:
"He's at the Kuzmins'! He's at the Kuzmins'!"
And the house goes to war.
I've seen a lot of drills. I've never seen one like this. Nobody gives an order. Everybody just knows.
Grandma takes the big honey pot (not the little one; the little one is empty, and the mouse who emptied it is now in debt) and puts it in the chest. Right at the bottom, under a folded set of clothes she keeps in there, white linen, never worn.
"My burial clothes," she says, to nobody in particular. "Nobody searches a dead woman's clothes. Especially when she isn't dead yet."
Fedya is sent out to the barn with the goose under his arm. The goose doesn't want to go. The goose makes its feelings very clear. Fedya comes back with a bleeding thumb and hay in his hair.
My mother stands in the middle of the room with Gavrila's brick of tea in her hands, looking for a place to put it.
"Not the chest?"
"The chest is full," says Grandma.
My father, who hasn't said a word all morning, doesn't even look up.
"Under the baby. Nobody searches under a wet baby."
So it goes under my straw.
I lie on top of a brick of tea and think: Sitrep. I am now an accomplice.
The steward is a thin man with a book under his arm, in a long coat of smooth dark town cloth. Everything else in this room was spun at home. His coat makes the whole house look homemade, which I suppose is the idea. He comes in with the village elder behind him. The elder is a neighbour, an old man called Uncle Kirill, who keeps looking at the floor as if he'd like to apologise to it.
When the door opens, my mother pulls her headscarf forward over her forehead and moves to the far end of the bench, where the light from the window doesn't reach.
The steward doesn't cross himself at the red corner. He just looks around the room, pricing it.
"Stepan." He sits down at our table without being asked. "Cold today."
"Cold," my father agrees.
The steward opens his book and takes out a little bottle of ink. The ink is frozen. He looks at it with disgust and puts it on the edge of the stove to thaw. While it thaws, nobody says anything. It's the longest silence I've heard in this house.
Grandma sits on the bench by the stove with her hands in her lap, looking very old and very harmless. I've known her for five weeks. She's neither.
When the ink is ready, the steward reads.
The quit-rent for the half-year: so much. The poll tax: so much. Dues on the forge, because a forge earns money and the master wants his share of it: so much. Days of work on the master's land, come spring: so many, for the household. He reads it all in the same voice, like a priest reading the names of the dead.
My father puts coins on the table. I know where those coins come from. Half of them are the Lapin boy's, for six spearheads that don't exist yet. Three nights each. He hasn't even started.
The steward doesn't just count them. He takes a little brass thing out of his coat, round and flat like a pocket watch, with a small dull stone set into the lid. He holds it over each coin in turn. Over each one it gives a tiny click, like a cricket. Click. Click. Click. Every coin.
The steward closes the lid. "Good silver," he says. He sounds almost disappointed.
A pocket watch that can tell a good coin from a bad one. I've never seen anything like it. I'd give a lot to take it apart.
Another stone. The Kuzmins' star had one too.
The steward writes in his book.
"Short by forty kopecks."
"At Easter," says my father.
"The master doesn't wait for Easter, Stepan."
"Stepan's good for it, sir," says Uncle Kirill to the floor. "He did the hinges for the master's new gate. Did them well, too."
The steward taps his pen on the book. Then he writes something, slowly.
"With interest," he says.
My mother is watching the pen the whole time. She doesn't blink.
Then the steward looks up and sees my cradle.
He looks at me for a long moment, the way you'd look at a calf at the market.
"New?"
"Born before St Nikolay's," says my father.
"Boy?"
"Boy."
The steward nods and writes something in his book. It doesn't take long. One line.
"Another male soul," he says. "Good. The master will be pleased."
Another male soul.
Not "a son". Not "a baby". A soul. Counted the way you count sheep.
Written down. Like my mother. That's two books I'm in now: God's, and the master's.
In twenty years I'll be a head for the tax and a body for the army. Somewhere in a house I'll never see, I've just become a line in a column. The master will be pleased.
On the radio, once, they asked if I was worth eleven kilometres. Here, a man with frozen ink has worked out my price before I can hold up my head.
I used to say the state is a family. I believed it. I said it at school, I said it in the army, I drank my tea out of a mug with the president's face on it.
Well. Here's the family. It comes twice a year with a book.
"Healthy?" asks the steward.
"Weak as a kitten," says Grandma at once. "Won't last the winter, poor thing."
She says it with a perfectly straight face. My mother's face doesn't move either. I've seen this before. Grandma nearly took Gavrila's head off for calling me handsome. Here, you don't praise a baby out loud, or something might hear you and come to take him.
"Then I'll write him in lightly," says the steward, and almost smiles.
And that's when the goose honks.
It's a long, loud, outraged honk, and it comes from the barn, which is about ten steps from where we're sitting.
Nobody moves.
The steward slowly lifts his head.
"Was that a goose?"
Grandma, who until this moment has been as deaf and slow as an old stump, answers instantly.
"That's the Kuzmins' goose. It visits."
"It visits."
"Every day. We feed it out of Christian kindness."
The steward looks at her for a long time. Grandma looks back at him with the face of a saint on an icon. Behind her, Fedya has both hands over his mouth.
The goose honks again.
The steward looks at the door. He looks at the frost on the window. He looks at his book, and at his ink, which is already starting to freeze again.
He closes the book.
"God keep you," he says, and goes.
Uncle Kirill follows him out. At the door he stops, turns round, and looks at Grandma.
"The Kuzmins ate their goose at Christmas," he says quietly. "I was at the table."
Grandma doesn't blink. "Then it's come back to visit them, too."
Kirill looks at the floor, the way he always does. But this time his beard is twitching.
"Save me a leg at Easter," he says, and closes the door behind him.
Sitrep. After-action report.
Losses: forty kopecks, with interest.
Enemy equipment observed: one brass coin-checker. Very good. Want one.
Assets concealed and not found: one pot of honey, one brick of tea, one goose.
Collaborators: one village elder. Price: one goose leg.
Commendation for valour: Grandma.
Grandma gets the honey pot back out from under her burial clothes. Everyone gets a spoonful, even Fedya, even though Grandma gives him a long look while he eats it. Then she dips the corner of my rag into the pot and gives it to me.
Best rag yet.
When the honey is put away, my mother counts the coins that are left. It doesn't take long.
"Salt," she says. "Enough for salt."
"The spearheads will pay the rest," says my father.
She nods. Her eyes go to the shelf behind the stove, to the small spoon with its notch.
"Two winters ago, there wasn't even salt," she says.
"This winter there is."
My father says it simply, the way he says everything. And my mother puts the coins back in their little bag and ties it up, and then she comes over to the cradle and fixes my blanket even though it doesn't need fixing.
Grandma says it from the stove, to nobody.
"If the Tsar knew what they do to us, he'd hang that steward from the master's new gate. On Stepan's hinges."
Nobody argues. In the red corner, next to the saints, there's a cheap print of the Tsar, so black with smoke that you can only see the crown. Grandma bows to it the same way she bows to them.
I know this one. The good tsar who doesn't know. We had it too: the president is fine, it's the people under him who steal. I said it myself, at the front, every time the pay didn't come.
I'm not sure I've stopped saying it.
That night I dream about the crater.
It isn't a dream, exactly. It's the shelf. It falls open on its own while I'm asleep, and everything is there, perfect, the way everything is perfect now. The cold mud. The smell of the earth. The little buzzing sound, coming closer.
I wake up screaming.
Not a soldier's scream. A baby's. Thin and high and helpless, the only kind I've got.
And someone comes.
Straight away. Bare feet on the boards before I've even finished the first breath. Hands under me, lifting. It's my mother. She wasn't asleep. I don't think she's slept properly in two years.
In the hospital, I tapped on a strap for weeks. Night after night. Nobody came. Nobody could.
Here I make one noise, and the dark gets up and comes for me.
She doesn't light a splinter. She walks me up and down in the dark, the way mothers do, and when that doesn't work she takes me to the window.
There's only one window in the house with real glass in it. One small square pane. My father put it in himself, and Grandma says he's prouder of it than of any of his children. It's covered in frost. My mother scrapes a hole in the frost with her thumbnail and holds me up to it.
My eyes are better than they were a month ago. Not good. Better. Good enough for this.
Outside: snow, blue under the moon. The yard. The black shape of the forge. The fence. Then a long white slope going down to the river, which is frozen and wide and flat, like a road made of glass.
And on the other side of the river, a hill.
A big one, high and steep, rising straight up out of the far bank. And on top of it, lights. Lots of lights. Too many for a village. Little yellow points, scattered all over the top of the hill and down its side, like someone has spilled a bag of sparks.
A city.
I know that hill.
I know the shape of it. The way it rises from the water. The way the river bends below it. I've seen that hill from this side a thousand times, from buses and trains and the back seats of cars. I grew up looking at it.
Along the very top, against the stars, there's a dark jagged line that could be walls and towers. But there's no bridge. No orange street lamps. No glow of a whole city on the low clouds. Just the hill, and the frozen river, and the lights.
Most of the lights are yellow and small, and they flicker: candles, in windows. But a few of them, right at the top, are different. They're white, almost blue, and perfectly steady. Like the light in the Kuzmins' Christmas star, only bigger, and many more of them.
I don't know what kind of candle burns like that.
But it's the same hill.
I'm home. I'm just very, very early.
Somewhere on that hill there should be a bus stop where I waited every morning in my first year. A kitchen with cherries on the oilcloth. Grandpa, tapping a spoon on the table. There isn't. Not yet. Maybe not ever; I don't know how any of this works.
And Timur. Timur, who walked eleven kilometres with steel in his back so that somebody would come for me. When he came to see me in the hospital, I couldn't see him, couldn't hear him, couldn't say thank you. I tapped something else instead.
I hope he's forgiven me for that.
Thank you, Timur, I tell the hole in the frost. I'm still alive.
My mother starts singing.
Very quietly, so she won't wake anyone. It's a lullaby I don't know, about a cat on the stove and a wolf far away in the forest, a wolf who isn't coming tonight, not tonight, because the river's frozen and Papa's near. When she gets to the part about the wolf, she sings it twice. It doesn't rhyme very well. I don't think she's singing it right. I think it's the only one she knows.
She put her hand on his chest while she sang. It was a habit older than any of her children. A healer's hand rests where the heart is, and a healer can't help checking. She let the smallest thread of worked mana go into him, the way she had with Masha and Fedya and the two who weren't there any more, to feel his heart and his breathing from the inside.
His heart was fine. His breathing was fine.
But under her palm there was something she had never felt in a baby before. She couldn't have said what it was. Only that it was there, and steady, and his.
Her hand is warm. Warmer than a hand should be, for a second; then it's just a hand. A tired woman's hand, rough at the fingertips, resting on a baby.
And under it, for a moment, I think the hum gets louder. Once. Like a spoon tapped on a kitchen table.
Or maybe I just want it to.
My mother stops singing.
She looks down at me. In the moonlight from the window I can see her face properly, up close: thin, tired, older than she should be, with a little line between her eyebrows. And beautiful. Even now, even like this. Gavrila was right about the eyes.
"Hm," she says.
That's all. Just "hm". She looks at me for a long moment, as if I'm a word she almost recognises.
Then she kisses my forehead and goes back to singing about the cat on the stove.
And I'm happy.
It takes me a moment to recognise the feeling. I haven't had it in a long time. Not relief. Not "still alive". Happy. Warm and full and a little stupid, like coming out of the bathhouse, like Sunday morning at my grandmother's. A tired woman is singing a bad lullaby to me in the dark, and I wouldn't trade it for anything I had before.
But another part of me is wide awake. The part that sat at the back of the lecture hall and couldn't leave a problem alone.
Because I'm not sure that was nothing. The hum doesn't follow my heartbeat, and it doesn't follow orders. But tonight, under her hand, I think it did something. If it did, it isn't random. And things that aren't random follow rules.
Rules can be learned.
I've got no lab, no notebook, and no hands that can hold a pen. What I've got is a perfect memory, eyes that get better every week, and a lot of time. So I'll do it the old way. Watch. Listen. Write it all down in my head. What wakes it up, what makes it louder, what makes it go quiet.
Observation first. Explanations later. That's how it's done. I should have started that way, instead of giving it orders like a sergeant.
Experiment two, then. Properly this time: tomorrow night, when she puts her hand on my chest, I'm going to keep still and pay attention. No orders. Just listen.
I don't know if I'll hear anything. I want to find out so badly it almost hurts. I haven't felt that since my first year at university.
Behind us, the house is dark. The splinter in its holder burned out hours ago. Fedya is asleep on the stove with his mouth open, still holding the next splinter in his fist, ready to light it. One red coal glows in the stove.
Across the river, the city's lights burn all night long.
Here, we have one coal.
It's enough. For tonight, it's enough.