My hum has a line in it now.
I drew it myself, two years ago, the morning after the water trough. You can't see it. It's a mark, like the one a soldier scratches on his water bottle with his thumbnail. He doesn't drink below it, however thirsty he gets.
Above the line, I can spend. Below it, I don't. Not for curiosity. Not for pride. Not because it's Easter and I'm full of eggs.
Two years. I've kept it every day.
Sitrep, then.
Date: the end of winter. The snow on the roofs has gone grey and soft, and the icicles drip at noon. Age: four, and a bit more than two months. Height: up to Grandma's shoulder when she's sitting down. Speech: fluent, except for the R, which still won't come out right. Fedya thinks this is the funniest thing in the world, and he tests it every morning. Mobility: I run. Every morning before the others are up, I run to the church and back, along the fence where the snow is packed hard. Personnel: unchanged. Two parents, one grandmother, one sister, one brother. Everybody alive.
In this village, that last one is worth writing down.
Here's what I did with the two years.
I practised. Every day, a little, and never below the line.
The drop of water on the cabbage leaf turned into the skin of ice on the puddles, then the crust on the water bucket, then the frost on the inside of the window. Small things. Always small. The pool of the hum decides how much comes out, and mine is still the pool of a small boy. But small things, done every day for two years, stop being hard. They go quick and cheap, like feet finding the stairs in the dark. The first drop on the cabbage leaf took me a long, careful minute. Now I can clear the frost off the window with one look, and hardly feel it.
The second winter, I found out you don't have to make heat at all. You can move it.
I was holding the water bucket in the yard. The water was turning to slush. My hand was cold. And I thought: the heat that's leaving this water, where does it go? Into the air. Into the wood. Why not into my hand?
So I tried it. The slush in the bucket went stiff, and my palm went warm.
It cost almost nothing. Far less than melting the same slush. Of course it did. I wasn't making anything. I was only carrying it from one place to another, like a man moving coal from one shed to the next. Energy isn't made or lost. It only moves. I knew that at fourteen. I didn't know it applied to the hum.
After that, mud.
Our yard is mud from the autumn rains until May. Mud is only earth with water in it. Frozen mud is earth held together by ice. Let the ice go, and the earth falls back into the water. Take the warmth out, and it's hard again. I've done it, one way or the other, more than three hundred times. I can turn a frozen wheel track soft under my boot without stopping, and freeze the edge of a puddle so a hen can walk on it. The hen is not grateful.
The family knows. Of course they do.
My mother found out first, the way she finds out everything. The autumn before last, she came in early and caught me drying Fedya's wet felt boots with my hands. She didn't shout. She sat down on the bench and looked at me without a word. Then she went and got my father.
They didn't punish me. They made rules. Small things, in the house. Nothing outside. Never, ever where the steward can see.
So now I do small things where everybody can see me. I warm the washing water. I take the ice off the well bucket. When Grandma's knuckles ache in the frost, I hold her hands until they're warm, and she calls me her little stove.
The rest I keep to myself. The line, the mud, the counting. A small boy with warm hands is a blessing from God. A small boy who knows exactly what he's doing is something else.
Nobody teaches me. I'm four. Nobody teaches a four-year-old anything except to keep away from the fire.
But they teach the others. And I'm always in the room.
My mother teaches Masha. Which herb is for a cough, and which for a fever, and which will kill you if you get it wrong. Why you boil a rag before you put it on a wound. Where the big vessels run in an arm, and where you press if they're cut. I sit by the stove with a wooden horse I'm too old for, and I learn it all.
My father teaches Fedya. Not the runes yet. Fedya isn't allowed to cut a rune until he's grown. But the iron. Which colour it has to be in the fire, cherry or straw or white, and what each colour is good for. I pump the bellows now, which is my job, and listen.
And Gavrila tells Fedya about monsters. He tells him at our table, when he comes for supper, with his big voice, waving his hands. Fedya forgets half of it by the morning. I don't.
I learn other things too, on my own. I run. I carry water, in a small bucket Papa made for me. I bring kindling, and turn the hay, and sit on the bellows for an hour at a time. Muscle doesn't make the hum. I worked that out early. But a body that's fed, and tired the right way, and sleeps well, keeps it full. And when I learn something new and hard, it grows. Not much. A tiny bit, here and there. Every day a little.
Two years of tiny bits add up.
The iron road came while I was learning.
For two summers, every working hand in our house gave four days a week to the master's lower meadow. Stumps out. Stones out. A ditch along the road. My father and mother, Masha, Fedya, and Grandma, too, when her knees let her. I carried the water.
On the other side of the ditch, the Department's diggers worked with us. An artel, a team of hired men from the city, with their own foreman and their own cook. They dug the same ditch, with the same spades, in the same mud. Every Saturday a clerk in a green coat sat at a table at the end of the meadow and paid them. In silver.
Same ditch. One side was paid. Our side got the master's thanks, through the steward, at the end of the summer. It was the first time I'd seen the steward smile.
Now there's a bank of earth along the lower meadow, as high as a man, and two iron lines along the top of it. They run past the end of the village, then out across the marsh on a long causeway, a raised road of logs and gravel, towards the city. Everybody says the first train is coming soon. Everybody has said so since the autumn.
I kept my word about the egg.
The Easter after, I saved Fedya half of mine. He'd forgotten all about it. He stared at the half egg in my hand as if I'd done a miracle. I hadn't forgotten. I remember that Easter well: the onion-red shell, the crack down one side, Fedya's mouth hanging open.
That's the strange part.
A few weeks ago, lying on the stove, I tried to remember the cloth Matryona the midwife wrapped me in, my very first night. The colour of it. The pattern. Two years ago, I could have seen it as clearly as if it was in front of me. Every thread.
Now, where it should be, there's a blur. Grey, or brown. I don't know.
I tried the baptism next. The priest's beard. The smell of the oil. It's there. But it's thin, like a picture left too long in the sun.
My old life is all still there. Every lecture, every page, every face in the trench. I checked. I lay on the stove for an hour and walked through it, room by room, like a man checking his house after a burglary. Nothing missing.
It's this life that's going. The first three years of it most of all, the oldest part, going thin at the edges. And since about my third birthday, things don't stick the way they used to. They still stick better than anybody's in this village. I can still tell you which week the frost came last winter, and what Gavrila brought at Christmas. But I couldn't swear to every puddle and every day any more. It isn't perfect. Something has gone down a step.
I said once, on this stove, with half an egg in my hand, that I'd never forgotten anything in my life.
It was true when I said it.
Masha wants to be a hunter.
Not a hunter of geese. A guild hunter, like my mother was, with a badge on her coat and a pack on her back. She's thirteen. She's wanted it since before I was born.
"Gavrila takes anyone from twelve," she says. It's the evening, and she's grinding something green in a pot, and she's being very careful not to look at my mother. "To his lessons. Just the lessons. Half the girls in the village could go."
"Half the girls in the village aren't going," says my mother.
"Because their mothers won't let them."
"Yes."
Masha grinds harder.
"I'll teach you everything I know," my mother says. She doesn't look up from her mending. "Every herb. Every fever. How to turn a baby that's coming the wrong way. Everything. For here. For this village. This village needs somebody who stays."
"You learned it out there."
My mother's needle stops.
"Yes," she says. "And I came back alone."
Nobody says anything after that. Grandma coughs and gets up to look at the bread, which doesn't need looking at. Masha grinds until the green stuff in the pot is water.
That night, on the stove, she whispers to Fedya across me.
"Tomorrow. After the cows."
"The lesson?"
"Shh."
"Can Kolya come?"
There's a pause. I keep my eyes shut and my breathing slow.
"Kolya always comes," says Masha.
The guild hall has a loft over the back room, where Gavrila keeps the pelts. You get to it by the woodpile, then the water butt, then a gap in the shingles that Fedya says he found, and that I'm fairly sure he made.
The dogs know us. Buran, the big grey one, lifts his head as we go past, and looks at Fedya climbing the water butt, and lays his head down again. He's seen worse.
So the three of us lie on our stomachs on a heap of fox and squirrel pelts that smell like a wet forest, and look down through the cracks in the boards.
There are eleven of them on the benches below. Big boys, mostly, fourteen and fifteen, and two girls. A stove, a lamp. Gavrila walking up and down in front of them like a priest who's lost his place in the book.
"Every beast," he says, "is a question. The fool asks it what it looks like. Big teeth? Fast legs? Good, now you know what it looks like. That's worth nothing. That's how it kills you." He stops. "What does it eat? Where does it sleep? How does it breathe? Where does it keep its warmth, and where does it keep its fear? Know that, and you know where to hit it. Know that, and you know what to put into the steel, or into the arrow, or into your own two hands. Magic into a beast you don't understand is a candle thrown at a bear."
"What if you don't have any magic?" says one of the girls.
"Most of you won't," Gavrila says. "Not enough to light a pipe. That's not the point. The beast might. The man next to you might. You need to know when it's happening."
He picks up a pine splinter from the table.
"Shut your eyes. All of you. When you feel something, put your hand up."
Eleven pairs of eyes shut. Next to me, Fedya shuts his too, hard, as if he's going to be tested. Masha doesn't. She's watching Gavrila.
Gavrila looks at the splinter. The end goes brown, then black. A thread of smoke. A little yellow flame.
Nobody puts a hand up.
"There," says Gavrila. "It's done. I've lit it. Look." They open their eyes and look. "Not one of you felt it. Don't be ashamed. I'd have been surprised. Feeling another man's magic is the hardest thing there is, for a beginner. It's like listening for one mouse in a mill. The first times, you have to hold your breath. You have to shut out everything else, all the noise of your own body, and listen. And even then, mostly, you hear the mill." He puts the splinter out between two fingers. "It took me weeks. Weeks of sitting in the dark with my eyes shut like a fool, before I felt anything at all. And in a crowd, I still couldn't tell you who's doing what. Nobody could."
I'm not listening to the words any more.
I'm doing what he said. The beginner's way.
I hold my breath. I shut out the pelts and the smell and Fedya's elbow in my ribs. I shut out my own heart. I listen, the way I've been listening to my own hum every night for four years.
He lights the splinter again. He's doing it for the girl in the front, who asked to see it twice.
And there. Just there. For a moment, at the very edge of what I can feel, something in the room leans. Like the pull of air towards a door that someone has opened in another room. Faint. Gone almost before it came.
I let my breath out very slowly.
On the shelf marked MAGIC, I put a new line. Other people's magic: can be felt. Hard. Breath held, everything else shut out. One person, close, in a quiet room. Barely.
"That's all for tonight," says Gavrila. "Go home. And the rats in the loft can go home too, before their mother counts the children and comes up short."
Eleven heads turn and look up at the ceiling.
Masha has gone red to the roots of her hair. Fedya, flat on the pelts beside me, is grinning so hard I can hear it.
Gavrila doesn't look up. He's lighting his pipe.
The first train comes in the first thaw, on a Thursday.
The steward's men go from house to house the day before. Nobody is to go up on the bank. Nobody is to go near the iron. Gentlemen from the city will be on the train, guests of the master, and the master doesn't want his people under their feet.
So the whole village goes down to the lower meadow and stands at the bottom of the bank instead.
Nobody is working. That's how I know how big this is. Old men who haven't missed a morning's work in fifty years are standing in the mud with their caps in their hands. The spoon-carver from the porch by the church has brought his whole family. Grandma has brought a stool.
It's grey and wet. The snow on the meadow has gone to slush, and the ditch we dug is running with brown water. Fedya is on my father's shoulders. I'm on Masha's back. I'm much too big for it, and she tells me so every fifty breaths. But the bank is high, and the people are tall, and from down in the slush I'd see nothing but coats.
We hear it first.
Not the sound I remember. In my old life, trains rattled and roared and blew their horns. This is a hiss. Long and low and steady, like a kettle the size of a church. And under the hiss, something else. A hum. Not in my ears.
Under my ribs.
Then it comes round the bend at the end of the meadow, and every person on the meadow takes one step back at once.
It's black. Black iron, long and round, with a tall chimney on the front like a samovar's. Red wheels as tall as my father, with rods that go back and forth, back and forth. A big lamp on the front, burning white, small and steady, in the middle of the day. Steam pouring out from underneath it in white clouds that roll down the bank and over our feet.
In my old life, every train had smoke. Black smoke, thick enough to lean on, pouring out of the chimney. Sparks in it. Long after the train was gone, the smoke was still there, hanging over the tracks. You could smell a train before you saw it. Coal, or diesel. The smell got into your clothes.
This one has a chimney too. And something is coming out of it. White puffs, one with every turn of the wheels. Chuff. Chuff. But the puffs don't hang in the air. They go up a little way, and then they're gone. Like your breath on a cold morning.
It's not smoke. It's steam, like from Grandma's pot.
Behind me, an old man sniffs. "Where's the fire?"
There isn't one. A stove that walks, I said, two years ago. Well, here it is. And there's nothing burning in it.
Somewhere behind us, a horse screams. Somebody's cart goes into the ditch, and the horse goes with it, kicking. All down the street, the village dogs are howling.
It comes closer. The hum under my ribs comes with it.
It isn't like my mother's threads. It isn't the lean in the air that I felt in the guild hall. Nothing is being done. It's more like standing at the edge of a deep well at night. You can't see the water. You can't touch it. But you know it's there, a long way down, a great weight of it, packed tight and cold and still.
That's a crystal, in there somewhere. It has to be. The steward's little cloudy pea of a stone, the white light on the surveyors' brass box. Only this one is no pea. I can feel how much there is of it, like the cold coming off a cellar door.
I reach for it. I can't help it. The way you'd reach to see if a stove is hot.
It bites.
Not hard. Like reaching into the stove for the pot and getting the hot iron instead of the handle. A sting runs back up the hum into my chest, cold and hot at once, and I've snatched it back before I even know I've done it. The tips of it sting for the rest of the day.
All right. Message received. You don't touch that.
The engine goes past above us with a roar like the river ice breaking in April. My body wants to get down flat in the slush. I don't let it. Behind the engine come the carriages.
The first one is green, with gold lines painted along the side and glass in every window. Real glass, big squares of it, clearer than the master's. Behind the glass there are velvet curtains, tied back, and behind the curtains there are faces. Men with thick beaver collars turned up round their ears. Ladies in small bonnets tied under the chin with ribbons, and shawls with long fringes. One of them has a little white dog on her lap. They're looking down at us.
They look at us the way people look out of a train window at cows.
The second carriage is plain brown, full of dark green uniform coats with brass buttons. Department men. After that, a flat wagon with no sides, and on it a dozen soldiers in long grey greatcoats with muskets between their knees. Their faces are bored.
Then it's past us, hissing, going on along the bank towards the marsh.
The whole village lets out its breath.
"It walks," says Fedya, from my father's shoulders, in a small voice. Then, louder, to everyone: "It walks! Kolya said! A stove that walks!"
Nobody hears him. Everybody is running.
They run along the bottom of the bank, all of them, men and women and children, the old men holding their caps on, slipping in the slush, laughing. Masha lets me slide down off her back and grabs my hand, and we run with them. They want to see it go across the marsh. They want to see it go all the way to the city.
It doesn't go all the way to the city.
It gets a hundred steps out onto the causeway. Then there's a sound like a giant tearing a sheet of tin, and a scream of iron on iron, and the front of the engine drops.
Not far. A hand's width. Enough. The front wheels on one side have gone off the rail. The engine leans over, slowly, like a fat man sitting down in the bath, and stops. The carriages bump up behind it one after another. Steam pours out of everything.
And the hiss goes on and on, as if the engine is complaining.
Everybody on the bank stands still.
Then we're close enough to see why.
The rail on the marsh side isn't grey any more. It's brown. Not a little brown. Rust has eaten into it, flaking, bubbling, all along the bottom where it sits on the wooden beams. Under the front wheel, it has just snapped. The broken ends are as brown as bread crust all the way through.
Three months it's been lying there, maybe. In my old life, a rail would sit in a bog for thirty years before it looked like that.
The marsh will eat their iron and ask for more, Gavrila said.
"So the Tsar's horses don't get stuck in the mud," says somebody behind me, in a wondering voice.
It's Fedya. He has said it loud, as if he's only just understood it. It's the thing Petka told him, two years ago. The whole reason for the iron road.
For a moment, nobody moves.
Then the spoon-carver laughs.
It's a big laugh, from the belly, and it goes through the crowd like fire through straw. Everybody's laughing. Old men, women, children. The man next to us bends over with his hands on his knees. Even Grandma, on her stool at the back, is wheezing. A machine that pulls itself, with no horses, from the city all the way to the capital, and it's sitting in our marsh with one foot in the mud, stuck like a cart in a ditch.
The people go up the bank to see better. Just a little way. Then a little more. Curious, laughing, pointing at the broken rail. The spoon-carver goes nearest. He's pointing at the wheel and saying something to his wife, and she's laughing so hard she has to hold his arm.
The door of the green carriage opens.
The Department men have put planks down on the gravel. A gentleman steps down onto them. A young one, in a tall black hat and a long cloth coat with a beaver collar, with side-whiskers combed out like a cat's. He holds up a hand for the lady.
She has to come down the steps sideways. Her skirt is as wide as our door. There's a cage under it. I know that shape from old paintings: steel hoops, one inside the other, like a bell, so the silk stands out all round her and never touches her legs. Over it, a velvet cape lined with fox, open at the front. A bonnet no bigger than a bowl. She holds her skirts up out of the mud with one hand, and the little dog with the other.
Then another gentleman. Older. He wears a long grey greatcoat with a short cape over the shoulders and a beaver collar. He looks like an old general in a painting. Under the open coat, there's a uniform with a star on the chest. He carries a stick with a silver top. He doesn't hold up a hand for anybody.
They stand on the planks and look at the engine. Then they look at us.
The older one says something to a Department man. I can't hear what. Then I can, because he says it again, louder, as if we might be deaf.
"Is this what our host calls his people? Keep them back. They stink."
The soldiers get off the flat wagon.
They don't hurry. That's the thing I'll remember. They come down along the gravel in no hurry at all, with their muskets held across their bodies, and they walk into the crowd as if it's long grass.
The spoon-carver turns, still half laughing, to see what's happening. The first soldier hits him in the face with the butt of his musket.
I hear his nose go. A short, wet crunch, like a boot through the ice on a puddle. His head snaps back. When it comes forward again, the blood is already pouring out of both nostrils at once, over his mouth, into his beard, down the front of his coat. He sits down in the slush. He opens his mouth, and blood and a tooth come out of it together. His wife screams.
Then they're all at it. Butts, boots. They aren't fighting. Nobody is fighting back. They're clearing. An old man takes a musket butt in the chest and goes down the bank on his back with his arms out, and his head hits the gravel, and his cap goes into the ditch. A woman is shoved so hard she falls on her child, and the child's howl stops dead under her, then starts again. A boy of Fedya's age gets a boot on the ear and comes up with blood running out of it.
The spoon-carver is trying to get up. One of the soldiers kicks him in the ribs. It makes a sound like a sack of grain dropped on a floor. He folds round the boot, and stops trying.
Their faces are bored. The same faces they had on the wagon. Wishing it was dinner time.
The village runs back down the bank. Nobody's laughing now.
On the planks, the lady with the little dog is laughing. She thinks it's funny. People falling over in the mud. She holds the dog up so it can see.
The older gentleman feels in his coat pocket. He takes out a coin and throws it. It turns over once in the air, shining, and lands in the slush at the bottom of the bank, by the spoon-carver's wife.
"For the entertainment," he says.
He turns his back on us and gets into the carriage.
The spoon-carver's wife is kneeling in the slush, holding her husband's head in her lap. His nose is pointing the wrong way. He's breathing through his mouth, in bubbles. Her apron is red. She looks at the coin.
One of the soldiers stands over her.
"Pick it up," he says. "His honour gave it to you."
She doesn't move.
"Pick it up."
She picks it up.
Masha is pulling us back. I didn't notice when she put me down. She has my hand in one hand and Fedya's collar in the other, and she's walking backwards, very fast, without turning round, the way you back away from a dog.
Fedya isn't fighting her. He isn't crying, either. His fists are shut so tight his knuckles are white. He's looking at the coin.
Behind us, somebody spits in the slush. Then somebody else. Nobody says anything. They don't look at each other.
We walk home across the meadow we cleared, along the ditch we dug, without a word.
On the causeway, the engine sits in the marsh with its white lamp burning. It goes on burning all afternoon, steady, without a flicker, while the gentlemen stand on their planks and wait for somebody to fix it.
The steward comes for my mother the next morning.
He doesn't come in. He stands in the yard in his town coat, in the mud, with two of the big men from the manor yard behind him, and he calls her out like a dog.
"Dasha. The master wants you at the causeway."
My mother is at the door with her green bag already on her shoulder. She was on her way to the spoon-carver's house. His wife came to our gate at dawn, white as paper, and said his cheek had gone soft, like a rotten apple.
"The carver's face is broken," my mother says. "I'll come after."
"You'll come now."
"Is somebody hurt at the causeway?"
"Nobody's hurt." The steward looks at his gloves. "The Department men worked all night to mend the line, and they'll work all day today, and tonight. The gentlemen are staying at the manor till it's done. The master wants the engineers kept on their feet." He looks up at her. "He wants his guests to see what his estate can do."
My mother stands still on the step.
"They're not sick," she says.
"They're tired."
"Tired isn't sick. Tired is what sleep is for. If I give my share to tired men, and somebody here breaks a leg—"
"Then they'll have to break it next month," says the steward. "The master's orders. Bring your bag."
Grandma is in the doorway behind her. I've never seen Grandma with nothing to say. Until now.
My mother goes.
She comes back at dusk.
I see her from the yard. She's walking down the lane from the meadow very slowly, with one hand on the fences as she passes them, the way the old men walk after a funeral.
She's white. Not tired-white. White to the lips, the colour of the wall, the colour of old snow. Her hands are shaking so much she can't open the gate. Masha runs and opens it for her.
I know what that colour means now.
I've spent two years watching my own hum, and my mother's, and I've learned this much. You can spend a lot, and nobody can tell. Most of the bucket can go, and you just feel tired, like anybody after a day's work. It's only near the bottom that the colour goes. The cold comes, and the shaking, and the white.
My mother has scraped the bottom of hers.
She sits down on the bench against the wall and doesn't take off her shawl.
"Twelve men," she says. "Not one of them sick. Cold and tired, that's all. They'd been told to work two nights through. So I gave each one enough to work through two nights." She looks at her hands, which won't keep still in her lap. "The carver's wife was waiting at the bottom of the bank when I came off it. I had nothing left to give her. Not one thread."
Nobody says anything.
My mother leans her head against the wall and closes her eyes.
"They had tea," she says. "In the carriage. The gentlemen. They watched me through the glass and had tea."
The next day, she sleeps until noon. The day after, she can stand up straight again, and she goes to the spoon-carver's house with her green bag. His nose has already started to knit, crooked. She does what she can.
That Saturday morning, while my mother sleeps, my father takes Fedya into the forge to work, and I go too, because the bellows are my job.
It's the warmest place in the village. The fire roars when I pump. My father has a hoe blade in the tongs, glowing cherry, and he's showing Fedya how to draw the edge out. Fedya hits it too hard and the sparks fly and my father says nothing, which is how he says "too hard".
Then Fedya asks it. The question I asked, two years ago, from the sacks.
"Papa. When you cut a rune. Why does it go dark? And then bright?"
My father doesn't answer straight away. He puts the hoe blade back in the fire and looks at it.
"A rune isn't a picture," he says. "The Lapin boy thinks it's a picture. He thinks you draw it, and it works. It's a promise. You promise the iron something, and then the iron does something for you. When it goes dark, that's it taking the promise."
"What do you promise it?"
"What it needs." My father turns the blade in the coals. "Rust, now. What's rust?"
"Iron going bad," says Fedya.
"Iron going home. Iron came out of the earth. Red stone, in the hills. It wants to go back to being red stone. Water helps it, and air. Leave it in the wet, and it goes back to the earth as fast as it can." He looks at Fedya. "The rust rune keeps it from going. Keeps it iron."
"And it does what you tell it?"
"If you know it well enough. If you know what it wants, and why." He takes the blade out. "And if you pay."
I pump the bellows and say nothing.
Iron giving itself up to the oxygen in the water, one atom at a time. Red ochre, the red stone in the hills: iron oxide, the stone it came from, the stone it's trying to get back to. My father has never heard the word "oxide". He doesn't need to. He knows the iron wants to go home, and he knows why, and he knows how to ask it not to.
That's understanding. It just isn't written down in my language.
On the shelf marked MAGIC, under Understanding, I add a line. Rune: a promise. The smith pays, and the iron keeps its side.
They come before noon.
Three of them. Two big men from the manor yard, the same ones who stood behind the steward, with sticks in their hands. And a thin clerk with a paper and a pencil behind his ear. The clerk doesn't come in. He stands in the forge door with the light behind him and reads from his paper.
"By order of the steward, for the master's guests and the Department. Forty plates for the iron road, with the rust mark on them. The iron comes from the Department by cart on Monday. The plates go to the causeway on Sunday. Not tomorrow. The Sunday after." He folds the paper. "That's all."
My father has his hammer in his hand. He doesn't put it down.
"Forty."
"Forty."
"Two plates a day, and I'm flat on the bench. You know that. Your master knows it. Forty, in a week—"
"Then you'd better start on Monday," says the clerk.
"And who's paying for them?" says Fedya.
Everybody looks at him. My father opens his mouth to send him out. Then he doesn't. He turns back to the clerk and waits, because it's what he wanted to ask too.
The clerk looks at his paper again, as if the answer might have changed.
"The Department pays two roubles a plate," he says. "Silver. Eighty roubles for the forty. Paid when they're counted."
Nobody in the forge says anything.
Eighty roubles.
I know what things cost in this village. I've been listening for four years. A good horse is thirty. A cow is fifteen, if she's young. A new roof, a whole one, with the beams, is less than that. My father has never held more than three roubles at once in his life. Grandma has never held one.
My father puts the hammer down on the anvil.
"Monday," he says.
That evening, Grandma counts it on her fingers.
A horse. A new roof. Boots. Real boots, leather ones, for everybody, even me. Salt, a whole sack of it. A dowry for Masha. She runs out of fingers and starts again.
My father sits at the table and doesn't say anything. But I can see him counting too.
My mother sits by the stove with her eyes shut. She's the colour of the wall again. Without opening her eyes, she says, "Count it when it's in your hand."
Nobody says whose hand. I notice that. I don't say anything. I'm four.
The iron comes on Monday, on a Department cart. Forty grey plates, each as long as my arm, stacked in the forge like roof tiles.
My father starts before the cart has gone.
I've watched him cut a rune before. He used to do it one at a time, in the evening, with the work done, and then lie on the bench and eat whatever Grandma put in front of him and sleep like a dead man. The rust mark on a plate is smaller than the rows he puts on an axe. Even so, two in a day is all he has.
This week, he does five in a day.
He sits on the stool with a plate across his knees and the little chisel in his hand. Tap. Wait. Tap. The iron goes dark, and bright again, and he puts it on the stack and picks up the next one. Fedya works the hammer for the ordinary jobs now, the hoes and the hinges, so the village doesn't go without. I work the bellows, and fetch water, and watch.
On Tuesday he stops eating. Grandma kills a hen, the brown one that doesn't lay any more, and he eats a bowl of the broth because she stands over him till he does.
The same day, the steward's man comes for my mother again. She comes home at dusk the colour of the wall. Grandma feeds them both like babies, my mother and my father, one after the other.
On Wednesday his hands start to shake between plates. He waits for them to stop, and then he cuts the next one.
On Thursday he goes grey.
I know that grey now. It's my mother's colour, at the gate, the first night. The colour you only get near the bottom. Every morning my father wakes up with a little back in him, and by the second plate it's gone.
Then he cuts three more.
Past the bottom of the bucket, there's no more hum. There's only the man. I can't see what he's paying with. But I can see it come off him, plate by plate. His cheeks go in. His eyes go back into his head. He's cutting the runes out of himself.
I have a line. I've kept it for two years. My father doesn't have a line. He has eighty roubles.
On Saturday night, very late, he picks up the thirty-first plate, and the chisel falls out of his fingers onto the floor.
He looks at it for a long time. Then he leaves it there and goes to bed.
Thirty.
They come on Sunday, after church, with a cart.
The same three. The two big men with sticks, and the clerk with his book. My father is in the forge to meet them, with his hammer in his hand, and Fedya, and me on the bellows, because Sunday or not, the fire has to be kept burning.
The clerk counts the plates. Then he counts them again. He writes the number in his book.
"Thirty," he says.
"Thirty," says my father. "I couldn't—" He stops. "Thirty."
The big men load them on the cart.
Then the clerk takes a leather purse out of his coat, and opens his book again, and reads.
"Thirty plates, at two roubles. Sixty roubles. Less the master's share, for the forge, which is the master's. Less the coal, which is the master's. Less the master's days, four of them, which you didn't work this week. Less ten roubles, which the Department keeps back, for the ten plates that aren't here." He turns a page. "Less the hen."
"The hen?"
"The steward heard you killed a hen. The hens are counted with the dues." He takes a single silver coin out of the purse and puts it on the anvil. "One rouble. The master is generous. He says to tell you so."
My father looks at the coin.
He doesn't pick it up.
"It's my hands," he says. His voice hasn't gone up. It's gone lower. "Not his forge. My hands. My wife's been at his causeway three times, on his orders. She's there now. I've been at this anvil day and night. Six nights, I hardly slept. I've got three children to feed. A wife. My mother." He's still looking at the coin. "I'm asking for what's fair. That's all. What's fair."
One of the big men laughs. He's the bigger one, with a beard that grows up his cheeks almost to his eyes.
"Fair," he says. "Listen to him." He leans in the doorway. "Your wife gives the master her share, smith. Every month. Nice and quiet. Never asks for anything back. Now you give yours."
Something goes out of my father's face.
I've never seen it happen before. I've seen him angry, a few times, the quiet kind, when Fedya let the geese into the cabbages. This isn't that. It's as if something that has been holding up his face for years and years has simply let go.
He puts the hammer down on the anvil, next to the coin. Very carefully. As if it's made of glass.
Then he crosses the forge in two steps and takes the bearded man by the front of his coat and throws him against the wall.
The whole forge shakes. The tongs fall off their nails. The bearded man's head hits the logs with a crack, and his eyes go blank. My father hits him once, in the mouth, and the lips split against the teeth.
For one moment, my father is standing over him with his fists shut, breathing like a horse.
Then the other one hits him across the back of the neck with his stick.
My father goes down on one knee. The bearded man gets up off the wall, spitting blood, and kicks him in the stomach. My father folds over and is sick on the floor of his own forge, and then they're both at it.
Sticks. Boots. They're not angry. They're doing a job. The stick comes down across his back, and his shoulder, and his back again, with a flat smack every time. The bearded one aims his boots. Ribs. Ribs. I hear one go, a dull snap, like a green branch bent too far. My father curls up on the dirt with his arms over his head, the way they teach you to, and doesn't make a sound. A stick catches him over the eye, and the eyebrow opens up, and blood runs down into the dirt under his face.
Fedya runs at them.
He gets one of them round the leg and hangs on, and the man takes him by the collar and throws him across the forge like a bag of bran. Fedya hits the edge of the coal bin face first, and goes down into the coal in a black cloud, and doesn't get up.
And I'm on the bellows.
The hum comes up in me like a dog off a chain.
I've got the whole forge fire right next to me. Heat everywhere, a whole furnace of it, white at the heart. I know exactly what to do with it. I've moved heat more than a hundred times. I'd only have to take it from the coals and put it where I wanted. In the bearded man's face. In his eyes. I can see it, clear as a drawing, how it would go.
Do it, says the part of me that kept walking at the front. Do it. Now.
And then what?
Then the steward's men go back to the manor and say the smith's little boy did something with the fire. And somebody comes for me, with a book. And somebody comes for all of us.
I hold the bellows handle with both hands. I hold it until my fingers hurt. And I watch.
It doesn't last long. It feels like an hour. When they stop, my father is lying on his side in the dirt, and there's blood on the anvil, and on the coin.
The clerk hasn't moved from the doorway. He comes in now, stepping round my father, and picks up the rouble. He wipes it clean on his sleeve, and looks at it, and puts it back in his purse.
"For the master's man's mouth," he says. He writes something in his book.
They go.
Masha comes running. Grandma behind her, as fast as her knees will go. Masha has already sent the Kuzmin boy flying to the causeway for my mother.
My mother comes at a run, all the way from the marsh. The steward took her again at dawn. One more day, he said. The plates go down today. She drops onto the floor beside him and puts her hands on his back.
I see the threads come out of her fingers. Two. Three. Thin as hairs, thinner than I've ever seen them. They go into him, and branch, once.
Then they stop.
There's nothing behind them. She's been giving since dawn. She has nothing left.
She pushes anyway. I can see her pushing. Her face goes from white to grey, and her lips go blue at the edges.
Grandma takes her by both wrists and pulls her hands away.
"Dasha," says Grandma. "No. There's nothing left in there but you."
My mother looks at her. Then she looks down at her hands. Then she puts them over her face.
It's Masha who moves first. She goes for the green bag and kneels down by my father and starts feeling along his ribs, one by one, the way my mother taught her, with her lips moving. Counting. Fedya crawls out of the coal pile, black from head to foot, with blood coming out of his nose and a split in his cheek where the bin caught him, and sits in the doorway and doesn't say anything at all.
My father turns his head on the dirt and looks up at the anvil, where the coin was.
"Eighty roubles," he says.
He starts to laugh. It turns into a cough halfway, and there's blood in it.
That's when I see them.
They're in the lane outside the forge. At the fences. In the doorway of the Kuzmins' barn. Half the street, it looks like. They must have heard the noise and come. Men with their caps in their hands. Women with their shawls pulled up over their mouths.
They're talking. Not loud. I can't hear the words, only the sound, low and quick, passing from one fence to the next.
Nobody comes in.
Old Kuzmin takes one step towards the gate. His wife puts her hand on his arm, and he stops. The spoon-carver is there too, at the back, with his crooked nose. He looks at my father on the floor. Then he looks down at his boots.
Ten days ago, they laughed at a train, and the soldiers broke their faces for it. Today, the steward's men did this to the smith, the strongest man in the village, in his own forge, in the middle of the day. Everybody knows what it means. If it can happen to him, it can happen to anybody.
So they stand at the fences and watch. Then, one by one, they look at the ground and go home.
That night, nobody checks my breathing.
My father is lying on the bench under the window, with his ribs bound up in strips of an old shirt and his face so swollen I wouldn't know him in the street. Masha found two cracked ribs, and maybe a third. My mother is sitting on the floor beside him with her back against the bench and her head on her arms. For the first time in four years, she's asleep before I am.
Grandma is snoring in the corner. Or pretending to.
On the stove, in the dark, Fedya says, "I'm going to the train."
He says it very quietly. Not to anybody. Just to the ceiling.
"No, you're not," says Masha.
"Tonight."
"And do what? Fight the soldiers? You're ten."
"Not the soldiers." He turns over. I can feel him turning, next to me. "The gentlemen's carriage. The green one. With the gold. Their glass." His voice is shaking. "I'm going to cover it in mud. All of it. And scratch it, all down the side, so they see it. Every time they get in it, they'll see it."
"They'll hang you."
"They won't see me."
"Fedya—"
"She held the dog up," says Fedya. "So it could see." His voice cracks. "And he wiped Papa's blood off the rouble. And put it in his purse."
Masha doesn't say anything to that.
I lie between them and look up at the dark.
In my old life, a man in my position would say no. Three children against a dozen soldiers with muskets. It's not a plan. It's a way of getting killed. I know exactly what the sergeant at the training ground at Mulino would have said about it. Most of it was swearing.
But the sergeant isn't on this stove. And I watched my father curl up on the floor of his own forge, and I held on to the bellows, and did nothing.
And besides. Fedya's going whether we say yes or not. I know my brother.
"I'm coming," I say.
"No," says Masha, at once.
"We always go all three."
She turns her head. I can feel her looking at me in the dark. For a long time.
Then she lets out her breath.
"Then I'm coming too," she says. "Somebody has to carry you back."
"Mud," I say.
"What?"
"Mud on our faces. All over. Hands too." I try to say it the way a four-year-old would. It isn't hard. It's the truth. "Faces shine in the dark. Like the moon. Mud makes them stop shining."
There was a sergeant at Mulino who scooped up a handful of wet clay and slapped it across my cheek on my second day. "A face is a lantern, Sasha," he said. "Put it out."
"And sticks," I say. "In our hair. In our coats. Then we're not people. We're bushes."
"Bushes don't walk," says Fedya.
"At night they do."
There's a pause.
Then Fedya laughs. Very quietly, into the sheepskin. It's the first time he's laughed since the train.
"Kolya," he says. "Where do you get these things?"
"I'm four," I say. "I think of things."
We go out when the moon comes up.
Fedya first, then me, then Masha, very slowly, past Grandma's corner. The snoring doesn't change. At the door, Masha stops and looks back at our parents, my father on the bench and my mother asleep against it. Then she shuts the door behind us without a sound.
The yard is frozen. In the day, it's mud to the ankle. At night the cold comes back and puts a skin on it, thin and hard, like the skin on boiled milk. It crackles under our boots.
We do the mud at the ditch behind the gardens.
Masha does me first. She scoops it up in both hands, cold as death, and smears it over my face and my ears and the back of my neck, very thoroughly, the way she does everything. Then my hands. Then she does Fedya, and Fedya does her, and none of us can stop shivering.
Then the sticks. There are alder bushes along the ditch. Fedya breaks off twigs, and Masha pushes them into our hats and the backs of our collars and through the belts of our coats, until we look like three little bushes.
Fedya looks at me in the moonlight, and his teeth show white in the mud.
"You look like a hedge," he says.
"You look like a hedge with teeth," says Masha. "Shut your mouth."
Then Masha takes my hand, and we go.
We go along the ditch. Our ditch. The one we dug for two summers for nothing. It runs all the way along the bottom of the bank to the marsh, and it's deep enough that even Fedya can walk bent over in it and not show his head. The water in the bottom has frozen. The ice holds us, mostly.
The train is where it was, out on the causeway.
It isn't dark. At the front, past the engine, lanterns are burning, and three men in green coats are working on the broken rail. I can hear the clink of their tools across the marsh. The men my mother kept on their feet.
At the back, by the flat wagon, the soldiers have a fire. I can see the shapes of them round it, and hear somebody laughing, and smell the smoke.
In between, the green carriage. Dark. Empty. The gentlemen are asleep at the manor, in the master's beds.
We crawl the last part. Out of our ditch, across a strip of frozen slush, and into the smaller ditch that runs along the bottom of the causeway itself. Close up, the carriage is enormous, a green wall with gold stripes, and the glass in its windows shines in the moonlight like water.
"Kolya. Stay here," Masha breathes. "Watch the fire. If anybody comes, throw a stone at my back."
I stay. I watch.
Fedya goes up the side of the causeway like a cat, and stands on the carriage step, and puts both hands into the bag of mud he's brought. He starts on the window.
Not a little mud. All of it. Great handfuls, slapped against the glass and rubbed round in circles, until the window is as brown as the ditch. Then the next window. Then the next. He works like he's in the forge. Fast and hard and without a word.
Masha has the nail. I saw her take it from the heap by the forge door before we left. It's one of the old rusty ones. Maybe one of mine. She starts at the back of the carriage, where the gold line is, and she pulls the nail along it, all the way, slowly, pressing hard. It makes a thin, high sound. To me, it sounds as loud as a scream. Nobody at the fire turns round.
Behind the gold line, there's a white scar in the green. Long and straight. Then another one under it.
I keep my eyes on the fire.
I hold the hum quiet. All the way down. I keep it ready, like a round in the chamber. I don't want to use it. I'd very much like to go home without using it.
Fedya's on the fourth window when one of the shapes at the fire stands up.
It comes along the causeway towards us. Slowly. Swinging a lantern. Not looking for anything. A soldier with his greatcoat open, yawning. He stops ten steps from the end of the carriage and turns to face the marsh, and starts to undo his trousers.
Then he turns his head, and looks along the carriage, straight at Fedya on the step.
Fedya doesn't move. Masha, flat against the side of the carriage with the nail in her hand, doesn't move. I don't move.
Three bushes. That's all we are. Three bushes in the moonlight.
The soldier holds up the lantern. He looks at the bush on the carriage step.
Then the bush on the step drops its bag of mud.
"Here!" the soldier yells. "Here! At the carriage! Here!"
We run.
Masha snatches me up off the bank in both arms, and Fedya jumps off the step, and we go down the side of the causeway and over the small ditch in three jumps. On the far side, Masha puts me down without stopping.
"Run!"
I run.
I've run to the church and back every morning for a year. My legs know what to do. Masha has my hand, and Fedya is on my other side, and we go out across the meadow towards the village, the three of us, as fast as we can go.
Behind us, the camp is shouting. Boots on gravel. Somebody yelling for a light.
It isn't fast enough. I know it isn't. My legs are four years old. Masha has to pull me along, half running, half dragging, and the meadow is wide and white and open in the moonlight, and there's nothing to hide behind.
I look back over my shoulder.
Five of them, coming off the causeway in a line, black against the snow. One has a lantern. Two have muskets. They're big men, and they're running hard. Forty steps behind us. Then thirty-five. Then thirty.
Under us, the crust crackles.
The skin on the meadow. Thin ice over deep slush, a finger thick. It holds Masha, because she's light, and it holds Fedya, because he's lighter. It holds me. It holds the soldiers, too, for now, because they're running fast and they're not putting a foot down for long.
Twenty-five.
I know that skin. I've known it all my life. I've taken it apart more than three hundred times.
I don't need to make anything. I don't need to make heat, or a wall, or a miracle. The heat's all there already. In the slush underneath, which is warmer than the night. In the air. In me. Frozen mud is only earth with a lot of tiny hands holding it together. All I need to do is warm the hands a little, and they let go.
I look back again. Not at the soldiers. At the white strip of ground between us and them.
The hum goes out of me fast. Faster than it's ever gone. It knows the way. Two years of puddles and wheel tracks and buckets, every morning, and now it runs down the old path like water down a ditch, and the white skin of the meadow goes grey behind our heels. Grey, then dark. Then wet.
The first soldier puts his boot on it, and goes through to the knee.
He goes down on his face. The one behind him falls over him. The one with the lantern tries to stop, and slides, and his boots go through too, and the lantern goes into the slush with a hiss, and goes out.
I keep going. We keep running, and the grey strip comes along behind us like the tail of a coat. Wider. Ten steps of it. Fifteen.
The soldiers are struggling. Up to their knees. Up to their thighs. One of them has lost his musket. One of them is on his back with his arms waving, and the slush is closing over his chest. They're shouting, but not at us any more. At the ground. At the night. At whatever is out there in the dark, with sticks for hair, running across a meadow that holds it up and swallows anybody who follows.
"Witches!" one of them screams. His voice cracks right up high, like a boy's. "Witches! It's witches! Night witches!"
And there it is. At the back of my neck. The hand.
Only it isn't telling me to keep walking this time. It's quieter than that.
Let it close.
The one on his back is sinking. The slush is at his chest. At his chin. One more push, and the meadow shuts over him like a lid. Over all of them.
And I want it. I'm not angry. I'm calm. Very calm, the way I was calm at the front, behind a rifle. They broke my father's ribs. They took his plates. Now they're chasing my sister and my brother through the dark with muskets. They aren't men. They're targets. That's all.
It would be so easy.
I look back at them. Properly, this time. At their faces.
The moon is on the meadow, and I can see them. Mud up to the eyebrows. Mouths open. The one on his back has lost his cap. His hair is fair, and he hasn't got a beard yet. He's the one who screamed. His voice cracked like a boy's because he is one. He's younger than Timur was. He's reaching up at the sky, at nothing, and he's crying.
They aren't targets. They're boys in big coats, a long way from home, as scared as we are.
Something in me turns over. It hurts, like a bone going back into place.
I stop.
It's hard. Harder than taking my hand off the trough, ten times over. Something in me keeps pushing. Let it close. Let it close. I hold on to Masha's hand and I don't let one more drop go. The grey strip stops spreading. Behind us, the soldiers are stuck in the middle of it, pulling each other out, shouting at the dark.
My legs have gone to wet rope. I keep them going, but they're slow. Masha and Fedya don't wait to be asked. They each take an arm and run on with me between them, my boots touching the crust every other step. Over the stream. Into the gardens. A fence, and they throw me over it and climb after me, and then another. The soldiers' voices are behind a row of houses. Then they're gone.
All along the street, every dog in the village is barking.
We wash in the bathhouse, in the dark, with water from the butt. It's ice-cold. The mud comes off in grey streams. The twigs go into the stove.
Fedya can't stop laughing. He's doing it without any sound, bent over, holding his stomach, with tears running through the mud on his cheeks.
"Witches," he gasps. "Did you hear him? Witches!"
Masha isn't laughing. She's looking at me.
I'm sitting on the bench, and I can't feel my hands. The cold has come in from the outside and the inside at once. I'm shaking, the way my mother shook at the gate. All I want in the world is to lie down on the bench and sleep for a week.
But I'm sitting up. I walked in here on my own legs. I'm still here.
"You're white," Masha says. "Under the mud. You're white as Mama."
She doesn't wait for an answer.
She does it the way my mother would. Exactly the way. She pulls off my wet coat and wraps me in her own dry shawl. She takes my hands and puts them inside her shirt, under her arms, where it's warmest, and holds them there. She rubs my feet, hard, always towards the heart, never the other way. She puts two fingers on the inside of my wrist and counts with her lips moving, the way my mother counts. Then she goes out, and comes back with Grandma's honey pot, and gives me a whole spoonful.
"Sugar," she says. "Mama says, when the cold's inside. Sugar first."
I eat it. It's the best thing I've ever tasted.
Fedya has stopped laughing. He's sitting on the other bench, wet and shivering, looking at me.
"It was you," he says. "The ground. Behind us. It was you."
I could say no. I've got a lot of practice at saying no.
"Yes," I say.
For a moment, nobody moves.
Then Fedya grins. Wide, and white, in the dark.
"I knew it," he says. "I knew it, I knew it. Mama thinks you just do the boots. You don't just do the boots." He leans forward. "Can you do it again?"
"Not tonight."
"But you can."
"Not tonight, Fedya," says Masha.
She's still holding my hands under her arms. She looks at me the way my mother looks at me sometimes. Then she does something my mother never does. She smiles.
"My little brother," she says, "is a witch."
"Witches are girls," says Fedya.
"Then he's a night witch."
"Then we all are," says Fedya. "All three of us. The night witches."
I didn't name us. A frightened soldier did, flat on his back in the slush, and my brother picked it up. Neither of them could have found a better name if they'd read every book I ever read.
"Then the night witches have rules," I say. "Nobody sees us come. Nobody sees us go."
"And nobody ever knows," says Masha.
She takes one hand out from under her arm and holds up her little finger.
"Nobody," she says. "Not Mama. Not Papa. Not Gavrila. Not anybody, ever."
Fedya hooks his little finger round hers. Then they both look at me.
I take my hand out from under Masha's arm. It's warm again. I hook my little finger round both of theirs.
In my old life, I had men I'd have died for. Lyokha. Timur. Gena. Vanya. We never made a promise like this. We never needed to. There wasn't anything we didn't already know about each other.
Now there's nothing my brother and sister don't know about me. Nearly nothing. They don't know about the other life. But they know the important part. They know what I can do, and they know I did it for them, and they're not frightened of me.
They're proud.
"Next time," Fedya whispers, "we'll take more mud."
"There isn't going to be a next time," says Masha.
But she's still smiling.
Half the village heard it in the night. A man's voice out on the marsh, high and cracked, screaming "Witches!" over and over, and every dog in the street answering him.
The soldiers come into the village at noon.
Four of them, on foot, with a sergeant. Their greatcoats are still black with mud to the waist. They go from house to house. Who was out at the causeway last night? Who has children? Who has a grudge?
The gentlemen's carriage, the sergeant says, has been covered from end to end with filth and scratched down the side like a cat's been at it, and his honour the master's guest is very angry. Somebody will pay.
He asks the spoon-carver first, because his house is nearest the church. The spoon-carver is sitting on his porch with a carving knife and a lump of birch. His nose has set crooked, flat across his face. Both his eyes are still ringed with yellow and green, ten days on, and there's a gap in his front teeth.
"Who was it?" says the sergeant.
The spoon-carver looks at him.
"Witches, your honour," he says. "Your lads said so themselves. We heard them shouting it half the night." He goes back to his birch. "The marsh is full of them. Everybody knows that."
The sergeant goes on to the next house. And the next. Every house says the same, or says nothing. Old women cross themselves and say "the marsh is a bad place, your honour". Old men look at the ground. Nobody has seen anything. Nobody was out. Nobody has a grudge.
When the soldiers have gone, an old woman by the well spits after them, and says, loud enough for the whole street, "May the marsh eat you too."
By the evening, the whole village is talking about the night witches. Some say they were rusalki, the drowned girls who come up out of the water in summer, come early this year. Some say they were the drowned, come for the iron road. Somebody's cousin's wife saw lights over the marsh the same night. Somebody else heard singing.
Fedya listens to all of it with a face as innocent as an angel's.
Two days later, the line across the marsh is mended. My father's thirty plates are holding the rail together where it crosses the wettest part, under every wheel that goes over it. The train goes back towards the city with the gentlemen in it, behind brown windows that somebody has tried to wash, and a white scar along the gold.
My mother sleeps for a day and a night. Then she gets up and starts on my father's ribs.
My father lies on the bench for a week. Then he gets up and goes back into the forge, because the hoes won't mend themselves.
My father's face stays grey for a month.
Lent comes. I don't mind it as much as I used to. Bread and cabbage and kvass, and the hum goes thin, the way it always does. I keep above my line.
On the third Sunday of Lent, the whole village goes to church to hear the volya.
Everybody knows it's coming. The deacon has been hinting for a week. The steward came on the Friday and told the village elder that a paper from the Tsar would be read on Sunday, and that every soul on the estate was to be there to hear it, and the elder told everybody, and everybody told everybody else. Grandma has been awake since before dawn. She's wearing the shawl she was married in.
The church is packed so tight you can't lift your arm. My father carries me. His ribs are better, and he's still grey, and he carries me anyway. The steward is standing at the front, by the wall, with his book under his arm, in the place where the master would stand if the master ever came to our church. He doesn't.
I know what's in the paper.
Not this paper. Another one. Ninth-grade history, the green textbook with the torn spine, chapter eleven, page two hundred and twelve. The Manifesto of the nineteenth of February. Free in name, at once. The rest, slowly. Two more years of the old dues and the old work while the papers are drawn up. Land, but not given. Sold, at a price set by the landlords, paid off over forty-nine years. And the best of the land kept back by the masters, cut off, so the peasant gets the worst field and pays for it like the best.
I could recite it. I learned it for an exam. I got full marks.
But this isn't my world.
This world has magic in it. Dwarves. A catfish older than the church. A train with a crystal in it that I can't even touch. Maybe the Tsar here is a different man. Maybe the paper is different. Maybe everything I know is a story about some other place, and here it will be better.
I don't believe it. I'd very much like to be wrong.
Father Ivan comes out with the paper. His hands are shaking. He has to start twice.
"By the grace of God, We..."
The words are long and heavy and full of old church language, and half the village doesn't understand them. It doesn't matter. They're waiting for one word, and when it comes, they hear it.
"...the right of free rural inhabitants..."
Free.
The church breaks open.
Women are crying. Men are crossing themselves, over and over, with tears running into their beards. Somebody at the back shouts, "God save the Tsar!" and the whole church shouts it after him, so loud the candle flames lie down. Grandma is on her knees, and my father is holding her up with his free arm, and she's saying it over and over into his coat. God save him. God save him. God save him.
I hold my breath.
Gavrila said it's like listening for a mouse in a mill. In a crowd, nobody could tell you who's doing what. He's right. I can't. I can't tell anybody from anybody. The noise is too much, and the bodies, and the heat, and my own heart.
But I'm not listening for anybody. I'm listening for everybody.
I shut my eyes. I shut out the candles and the shouting and my father's arm. I listen the way I listened from the loft.
And there. At the very edge. So faint I'd miss it if I breathed.
A lean. Not one, like Gavrila's splinter. Everywhere. All around me. From every side, from all the bodies pressed together in the dark, something is leaning the same way. Like the pull of air towards a door.
Towards the paper in Father Ivan's hands. Or through it. Past it. Out of the church, west, to wherever the man is whose name is at the bottom.
My own hum doesn't move. Not a hair. I'm the one bit of grass that isn't bending.
I open my eyes. My heart is going hard.
On the shelf marked MAGIC, I put a line, very small. When they love him, something goes out of them. Towards him.
Then I put a question mark next to it. One faint feeling in a crowd isn't a fact. But I don't think I'll be taking the question mark off it any time soon. And I don't think I'll forget it.
Father Ivan is still reading.
The church is still shouting, and then it isn't. Because he's got to the next part.
"...shall remain temporarily obligated to their landlords for two years..."
Two years.
"...the dues and the labour to remain as before..."
The labour. The master's days.
"...the land to be redeemed..."
Redeemed. Bought. With money nobody in this church has ever seen.
The shouting goes out like a candle. You can hear it go. Row by row, from the front to the back, people stop, and look at each other, and listen, and their faces change. Grandma is still on her knees. She has stopped saying it.
Page two hundred and twelve. Every line.
At the front, by the wall, the steward has opened his book. He's following the reading with his finger, line by line, the way you check a bill.
"What about the lower meadow?" somebody says, out loud, in the middle of the reading. It's the spoon-carver. His nose is still flat and crooked from the soldiers. "The meadow we cleared. Whose is that now?"
Nobody answers him. Father Ivan keeps reading. But everybody in the church knows. The lower meadow isn't anybody's allotment. The lower meadow belongs to the iron road, and the iron road belongs to the Department. Two summers, we dug that ditch. Now we'll pay forty-nine years for the field next to it.
We walk home in a long, quiet line, the whole village, through the mud.
Grandma holds my father's arm. She's an old woman today. I've never seen her look old before.
"The Tsar meant it," she says. "He meant to give us everything. It's them. The landlords. They've got hold of his paper and twisted it."
My father doesn't answer at first.
"It's his name at the bottom, Mama," he says.
Grandma stops walking. She looks at him. Then she lets go of his arm, and walks on by herself, and doesn't say anything else all the way home.
That night, I lie on the stove and can't sleep.
Fedya is asleep on one side of me, with his arm across my chest. Masha is asleep on the other, with her face turned to the wall. Below us, my father is on the bench, breathing carefully, the way you breathe with cracked ribs. My mother is sitting up beside him in the dark. Grandma is in her corner, awake. I can hear her not sleeping.
I think about the village.
About the share my mother gives every month, and to whom, and what else it means. About eighty roubles, and thirty plates cut out of my father's own body, and one silver rouble wiped clean on a clerk's sleeve. About the spoon-carver's wife picking a coin out of the slush. About two summers in the same ditch as men who were paid, and a paper today that says, in the Tsar's own words, keep digging.
I think about the master.
I've never seen him. In four years, I've never once seen his face. I've seen his painted house across the stream, with glass in every window. I've seen his steward, and his book, and his men with their sticks. I've seen his cousin's prices on the board outside the kabak and his guests' faces behind the carriage glass. He doesn't need to come down to the village. He's in every corner of it already. He's in the book, and the book is in everything.
And I think about the Tsar.
Two years ago, he forgave our arrears, all the old unpaid dues, with one line of ink. Grandma cried, and my father said "God keep His Majesty", and I was happy, and it bothered me that I was happy. It's the best feeling a state can give you, I thought, and it costs the state one line of ink.
Today it was a whole page. It cost him just as little.
And this time, I felt where the gratitude went.
And I think about the meadow.
About the boy in the slush, with his voice cracking and his face in the moonlight. About how calm I was. I wasn't scared, and I wasn't angry. I just wanted him under, and all the others with him, and it felt like the most natural thing in the world.
I know that calm. I learned it at the front. But at the front, it took me months. On the meadow, it was just there, waiting, the moment they came after Masha and Fedya.
Was that me? Or the hand at the back of my neck? Is there even a difference?
I turn it over and over in the dark. I don't get an answer.
Outside, far across the meadow, a white light moves along the bank. The night train, going back to the city. It doesn't stop here. It was never going to stop here. It goes out across the marsh, steady, without a flicker, over the rails my father's runes are holding together.
The gentlemen will ride over them to the capital and back, all their lives, and never once know whose hands those were.
Two years, the paper said. Then forty-nine.
I'm four. In forty-nine years, I'll be fifty-three.
I lie on the stove, and listen to my father breathing carefully in the dark, and count.