On the second Saturday in February, Efim comes to the black house.
I'm there, by the stove, with my hands in Rodya's tub. Osip is on the bench by the door, where the light is, with the wooden foot on his knee. The week's shoes hang from a peg over his head on a string, in pairs, pale and new. Fourteen pairs. I helped with the strips for every one of them.
Rodya hears him before anybody. His head comes up.
"Slap," he says, very quietly.
Then I hear it too. Boots on the frozen path from the ford. One of them makes a different sound from the other, a wet slap, as if the sole has come loose.
The door opens without a knock, and the cold comes in, and Efim comes in after it.
He's big, but not as big as I remember. Close up, he's thinner than he looks from across the lane at night. His coat is too short in the arms. The white mark is still there, through his top lip. He has an empty sack over his shoulder.
He doesn't look at anybody. He looks at the shoes on the peg.
"The house share," he says.
Osip puts down his work.
"The steward said six pair. At Christmas."
"Now he says twelve." Efim takes the string down off the peg himself. "There are a lot of feet up at the house. And winter's long."
"Twelve is the whole week."
"Then work faster."
Ulyana is by the stove with the baby. She opens her mouth. Osip looks at her, and she shuts it again.
Efim counts the pairs off the string into the sack. Two, four, six. His hands are quick, and he doesn't look up. Eight, ten, twelve. He leaves two pairs on the string and hangs it back on the peg, carefully, the way you'd put back something you'd borrowed.
On the way out, he passes the cradle. He stops beside it, just for a moment. The baby is asleep in there, with its fist by its face. He looks down at it.
Then he looks at nothing, and goes out.
"Next Saturday," he says from the door.
The cold goes out with him. The door bangs.
Nobody moves for a while. Then Osip picks up his old bone kochedyk, the big yellow one, and a strip from the basket, and starts a new shoe. His hands are steady. He doesn't say a word.
"That was the flour for March," says Ulyana, to nobody.
Rodya is sitting very still by the tub, with his hands in the water.
"He was afraid," he says.
I look at him.
"When he was taking them. The whole time." Rodya frowns. "Like somebody stealing eggs, with the hen looking."
Feeling another man's magic is like listening for one mouse in a mill, Gavrila told the big boys. You hold your breath, and shut your eyes, and mostly you hear the mill.
Rodya heard the mouse, and what it was afraid of, with his hands in a tub of water.
I think about the blind singers on the church step, with the boy leading them by the sleeve. That's where they go, Rodya said. When their mama and papa die.
Twelve pairs from fourteen.
That night on the stove, I tell the others.
Fedya sits straight up and hits his head on the ceiling, and doesn't even notice.
"Twelve?" he hisses. "The house hasn't got that many feet. Nobody's got that many feet."
"He sells half to the carter," says Masha. Her voice is very flat. "On Saturdays, by the traktir. The carter's wife has had new shoes every week since Christmas. Everybody knows."
"Then why doesn't anybody—"
"Because he's the steward's." Masha lies on her back, looking up at the dark. "Who are you going to tell? The steward?"
Masha never gets loud. It goes all the way through her instead, like the cold in a stone.
"The witches could," says Fedya.
"No."
"Why not? We did the train. A whole train. With soldiers."
"And Kolya came home from the meadow as white as Mama." Masha turns her head towards him. "And they'd have shot us, Fedya. If they'd caught us. They had guns."
"He hasn't got a gun. He's got a sack."
Masha doesn't answer that. She lies there, and I can feel her thinking, the way you can feel somebody breathing next to you in the dark.
"Twelve pair," she says at last. Very quietly. "From a blind boy's house."
Then, after a long time:
"If."
Fedya goes still.
"If," says Masha, "nobody gets hurt. Not really hurt. Nobody sees us. Nobody ever knows. And he doesn't drown." She looks at both of us. "I mean it. I'm not having a drowned man on us. Not even him."
"The ford," I say.
They both look at me.
So I tell them. In the words I've got, which are a five-year-old's words, so it takes a while. The black strip in the middle, where the water runs fast and the ice is thin. The white ice on both sides, thick enough for a man. The way he walks on the white, every evening, without looking.
"If the white got thin," I say. "Just where he steps. Just at the edge."
"He'd go in," says Fedya. His eyes are shining in the dark.
"How deep is it?" says Masha.
"To your waist. In summer." Fedya's already thinking. "Not even. To mine."
"Then he'd be cold," says Masha slowly, "and wet, and frightened, and he'd go home." She thinks some more. "And he wouldn't go to Osip's. Not that night."
"Not any night," says Fedya.
"And I'll be on the path with a bucket," Masha says. "Going for water. If he goes in, I'm the first one there. I shout. Everybody comes running, and they pull him out. Fast. Before he gets really cold." She looks at me. "You're sure it's shallow?"
"Yes."
"You're five."
"I'm sure."
She looks at me for a long moment. Then she nods.
"There's one more thing," says Fedya. "It'll be getting dark. You won't see him coming, Kolya. Not from the willows. Not in time."
None of us says anything.
We all know who hears everybody coming.
"Rodya isn't one of us," says Masha at last.
"He found Zhar through a shut door," says Fedya. "Gavrila's dogs can't do that."
"We don't tell him anything."
"He doesn't ask," I say.
Masha is quiet for a while.
"No," she says. "He doesn't."
On Monday, Fedya comes with me to the black house.
He's never been inside before. He stands in the doorway with his hat in his hands while Ulyana laughs at him and calls him the big brother, and six children stare at him from the stove. Then he crouches down by the tub, next to Rodya, as if it's something he does every day.
"Rodya," he says. "On Saturday, when he comes over the ford. Could you whistle? Like a bullfinch. When you hear him on the ice."
Rodya's hands stop in the water.
He doesn't ask why. I knew he wouldn't. But his face does everything his mouth doesn't. His ears go pink. He sits up very straight, the way he does when Osip lets him finish a shoe on his own. Then a little frown comes and goes between his eyebrows, and his fingers fidget with a strip under the water.
"Just before dark," he says, a bit too fast. "When the bell goes for the evening service. That's when he comes."
"Thank you," says Fedya.
"You're welcome."
Rodya goes back to his strips. Fedya stays crouched there, looking at him. Then he reaches out, and does something I've never seen him do to anybody but me. He ruffles Rodya's hair.
Rodya puts his hand up and pats his hair flat again, very carefully.
On the way home, Fedya doesn't say anything until we're past the church.
"He's like you," he says at last. "He knows things."
"He knows different things."
"That's what I meant."
The next Saturday is grey and still, and so cold that the smoke from every chimney goes straight up, like a row of poles.
I can't sit anywhere all day. Grandma says I've got ants in my trousers. She sends me out for kindling, then sends me out again, because I've brought in the wet.
Masha doesn't say anything to me. She doesn't say anything to anybody. She milks the cow, and sweeps the floor that she swept yesterday, and checks the yoke for the buckets twice, as if it might have broken in the night.
Fedya goes to the guild after dinner and comes back with Zhar's smell all over him. He sits on the woodpile in the yard and cleans his nails with a splinter, very carefully, one at a time. He never cleans his nails.
In the afternoon, the light starts to go.
"I'm going to Rodya's," I say.
"Be back before the bell's finished," says my mother. She doesn't look up. She's mending, by the window, while there's still light to mend by.
"I'll take him," says Fedya, getting up. "I'm going that way. To the guild."
Grandma is putting on her good shawl for the evening service. Masha takes the yoke and the two buckets off the nail by the door.
"Cow needs water," she says.
Nobody looks at any of us twice. Why would they? A girl going for water. A big boy taking a small one down the lane. It happens in every house, every evening, all over the village.
There are willows at the ford, too. Not as big as the ones below the mill. Three of them, bent over the near bank, with their roots in the ice. Their bare branches hang down nearly to the snow, like the hair of somebody who's just come out of the water.
Fedya and I go round behind the graveyard and come to them along the bank, from below, where nobody's path goes. We crawl in under the branches. It's dark in there already. Dark, and still, and it smells of snow and wet bark.
From here, I can see the whole ford.
The white ice on our side. The long dark strip down the middle, grey, with the water moving under it. The white ice on the other side, and the bank, and the path going up through the bushes towards the big house.
Across the ford, the path is trodden hard. The men have crossed it so often that you can see the place they all step. Three steps on the white on the far side. One long step over the dark strip. Then down on the white on our side, at the very edge, where the snow is beaten flat by boots.
Every one of them, every evening. The same place.
Further up, at the ice hole where the end of the village waters its cows, Masha puts her buckets down. She takes the wooden scoop and breaks the new ice off the hole. Slowly. She can take as long as she likes. There's nobody else there.
I take off my mittens and put both hands flat on the ice, in under the roots.
It's cold. That's all it is at first. Cold, and hard, and very still. Then, the way I do with Rodya's strips, I feel along it. Not with my hands. With the hum.
It's like feeling along a plank in the dark. I can follow it. Out from the roots, under the snow. Thick here, by the bank. Thick, and thick, and then the place where the boots come down, beaten flat. And then it ends. There's a lip, an edge, and after that the water, quick and black and moving, under ice so thin it's hardly ice at all.
Any fool can throw heat. Gavrila says it every Saturday, and I've heard him say it through the floor of the loft. "Throwing's easy," he tells the big boys. "Holding it where you put it, that's what this guild pays for. Most of you never will."
The edge is six steps from my hands. I count them on the ice. I've never done anything that far away before. Not on purpose.
I can't melt it. Not a slab that thick, not from six steps away. Ice is greedy. To melt it takes three hundred and thirty-four joules for every gram. The same heat would warm that water by eighty degrees, most of the way to boiling. First year at university, the table on the first page of the thermodynamics notes.
But I don't have to melt it.
I only have to cut it.
A line. Under the snow, along the edge, a hand back from the lip. Not all the way through. Just enough. Like scratching a line on glass before you snap it. Then the edge holds for a cat, or a bird, or a small boy, or nobody at all. And not for a man coming down on it with his whole weight, after a long step.
"You've gone quiet," Fedya whispers.
"I'm waiting."
"For the whistle?"
"For the whistle."
The bell starts.
It comes over the roofs from the church, behind us, slow and deep, one stroke and then the next. The evening service. People start to come out of their gates, up and down the street. I can hear their boots and their voices on the frozen road. Old women, mostly, in their good shawls. Grandma will be one of them.
The bell goes on. The light goes on going. The far bank turns from white to grey.
Then, from somewhere by the black house, so soft you'd miss it if you weren't listening for it, a bird.
A bullfinch. Low, and sad, and very short. Like somebody blowing across the top of a bottle.
Fedya grabs my sleeve.
I can't hear anything. Nothing on the far bank. Nothing on the path. Only the bell. But Rodya can, so I shut my eyes, and put the hum into the ice, and cut.
The heat comes up out of the ground under my knees, through my hands, and goes out along the ice in a thin line. Along the edge. It's like pushing a thread down a long sleeve. The further it goes, the thinner it gets. At three steps, I lose it. It just stops, like a voice when somebody walks too far away.
I start again from the roots.
"Kolya." Fedya's breath is quick and short against my ear. "Kolya, hurry."
I don't hurry. Hurrying is how I lost it. I go slower this time, a hair's width at a time, and I feel the ice give in front of the line. Three steps. Four. My hands have stopped feeling cold. They've stopped feeling anything at all.
I've counted more than thirty of my own breaths since the whistle when I hear him too. Boots on the frozen path, coming down through the bushes on the far bank. One of them makes a different sound from the other.
Slap.
Five steps.
Slap.
He's on the ice. I feel it, through my hands. Not him. His weight. The whole plank of the ice takes it, and settles, and creaks, the way a floor does when somebody walks across the room above you.
Three steps on the white, on the far side. Three.
Two.
The line goes to the end of the beaten place. I stop.
One.
He takes the long step over the dark strip, the same long step everybody takes, without even looking down. His left boot comes down on our side, at the edge, on the white.
The edge goes.
There's a crack, sharp and loud. The whole slab tips under him, all at once, and he goes down with it, straight down, into the black water.
He comes up with his mouth wide open. A huge, tearing breath, and then another, and another, so fast he can't do anything else. He can't shout. I know why. In the bathhouse, when Grandma tips a bucket of well water over you after the steam, your whole body breathes in on its own, and you can't stop it. This is the whole stream.
His arms go out. He grabs the edge. A piece breaks off in his hand. He grabs again, further along, and that breaks too, right where my line runs. A slab of white the size of a door slides off into the black, and he goes under with it.
Fedya makes a sound beside me. Not a word.
The man comes up again, further out. His hat is gone. His hair is flat on his head, and water pours out of his beard, and his eyes—
He's looking at the willows.
He can't see us. It's nearly dark under the branches. But he's looking straight at me, six steps away, with his eyes so wide that the white shows all the way round.
I know that face. I've seen it at the front, on men who knew. I think I had it on myself, once, at the very end, when there was nobody left to see it.
The water's pulling at him. The fast water in the middle has got his coat, and it's pulling his legs out from under him, down towards the dark strip. Towards the thin ice. Under it. His boots kick. He fights it. He gets an elbow onto the white, and then his chest, and he pulls himself up, and the white cracks under him, and he slides back. He does it again. And again. Every time a little slower.
His fingers scratch at the ice. I can hear his nails on it, under the bell.
Then he has enough breath for the shout.
"Help! Help me! People! Lord, help me! Lord!"
His voice is high and cracked. He gets one arm over the edge of the white, and he hangs there, with the water pulling at him, and shouts. His hand opens and shuts on the ice. Opens and shuts, as if it's looking for something to hold.
And there it is.
At the back of my neck. Small, this time. Just two fingers. Just a touch.
The edge where his arm is. I could cut that too. It would be so easy. It's right there, under my hands. One more line, and one more, and one more, all the way back to the bank, and every bit of white he gets hold of would come away in his hand. He took the flour for March. He took it from a house with a cradle in it, and he hung the string back on the peg as if he'd borrowed it.
I know this voice now. I heard it in the meadow, in the slush, in the moonlight. It's very calm. It always sounds so calm.
I take my hands off the ice.
Beside me, Fedya is on his knees, half out from under the branches.
"He's going under." His voice has gone high and thin. "Kolya, he's going under. He's going under the ice."
He starts to crawl out onto the white.
I grab his coat with both hands. "No! It'll take you too!"
He pulls. He's twice my size. For a moment he drags me out from under the willow, on my stomach, into the snow. Then he stops. He kneels there, on the bank, with me hanging off the back of his coat, and he doesn't go any further. He's shaking all over. His face is wet.
Out on the ford, the edge under the man's elbow cracks again. A long crack, running back towards the bank.
My line.
I put my hands back on the ice.
Not to cut. The other way.
I take the heat out of the white under his arm. Just there. Just a hand's width round his elbow, where the slush is. I pull it out and push it back down into the ground under my knees, where it came from. Six steps away, in the dark, with the man moving all the time, so the place I want keeps slipping away from me.
It's the hardest thing I've ever done with the hum. Harder than the train. It's slow, and it hurts, somewhere behind my eyes, and the cold comes back into my hands, and then up my arms, into my chest.
The crack stops.
The slush round his elbow goes stiff. Then hard. A crust, a finger thick. Not much. But it holds.
Up at the ice hole, Masha is standing quite still, with the scoop in her hand.
Then she drops it.
"Help!" she screams. She's running. Not towards the man. Towards the church, along the bank, with her shawl coming off. "A man's in the ford! A man's gone through the ice! Help! Somebody!"
She's louder than he is. She's louder than the bell. All along the street, the voices stop. Then the boots start, running.
But the first one there isn't from the street.
The door of the black house bangs open, and Osip comes out of it at a run. He comes down the bank in three jumps, with his belt already in his hand. At the edge of the white, he drops flat on his stomach, the way you do on bad ice. He pushes himself out along it on his elbows, until his face is a few steps from the man's. Then he throws the belt.
The man doesn't catch it the first time. His hands are too cold. They won't close. Osip pulls it back and throws it again.
This time, the man gets his wrist through the loop.
Osip holds on. He's a head shorter than the man, and half as wide. He lies there on the ice with the belt round both his fists and his teeth together, and holds on, while the water pulls at the other end. He doesn't say a word.
I hold the crust under the man's elbow. I don't know how long. Long enough that I stop feeling the ice, and then stop feeling my knees.
Then the people come. Men from the church porch, and old women in good shawls, and boys, and Father Ivan in his long coat with his beard flying. Somebody brings a ladder from the churchyard and pushes it out across the ice. Two men lie down on it. Somebody else gets hold of Osip's feet.
They pull.
The man comes out of the ford like a big black fish, all at once, with the water pouring off him. They drag him up the bank and into the snow. His lips are grey. He's shaking so hard his heels drum on the ground. He's crying. A big man, crying like a small boy, with water and snot in his beard. "Lord," he says. "Lord." Over and over, as if it's the only word he's got left.
I let go of the ice.
His sack is gone. It went under the ice, with the current. It was empty.
"Now," says Fedya, in my ear. "While they're all looking."
We go back the way we came. Along the bank, below the path, in the dark under the willows. Round behind the graveyard. Over the Kuzmins' fence. Nobody sees us come. Nobody sees us go.
I'm cold. Not on the outside. All the way through, like a stone that's been in the stream all winter. My teeth won't stop. Fedya looks at me under the graveyard wall, where there's a bit of light from somebody's window, and his mouth goes tight.
"You're as white as Mama," he says.
I walk on my own. Fedya walks next to me with his hand out, not touching, just there. He doesn't say anything else until we get home.
At our gate, I look back once.
Down at the ford, by the light of somebody's lantern, they're wrapping the man in coats. He's sitting up now. Somebody gives him a drink from a bottle, and he coughs most of it down his beard.
His voice comes up the street, thin and high, over all the other voices.
"It had my legs," he's saying. "Under there. Something had me by the legs."
In the morning, there's wormwood on Osip's gate.
A big bunch of it, grey and dry, from last summer, tied to the gatepost with a bit of string. Knotted twice.
I look at the knot for a long time.
Rodya is sitting on the step inside the gate, in the cold, with his cap on. When he hears me coming, he stands up, and puts one hand out, and finds the bunch. He holds it a moment. He rubs a bit of it between his fingers and smells it.
"Wormwood," he says.
He doesn't ask who put it there. He sits back down on the step, with his face turned towards the ford.
By the time the bell goes for the morning service, the whole village knows.
They talk about it all the way to church, and in the porch, and after the service, at the well, with their buckets on the ice. The old women stand in a ring, stamping their feet, and Grandma is in the middle of them, and I'm holding her hand.
"Up to his neck," says one. "In the ford. In the shallow place."
"It had him by the legs," says somebody's grandmother, very low. "He said so himself. Something under the ice. With hands."
The ring goes quiet. Somebody crosses herself.
"Morozko," says Grandma. "That's who. Grandfather Frost. Caught him by the legs." She shakes her head. "He'll have opened his big mouth to him, out there on the ice."
Two or three of the old women nod, very seriously. As if that settles it.
"Or the witches," says somebody else. "The ones off the marsh. The night witches."
"In February?"
"Why not in February? They've hung wormwood on the blind boy's gate. My sister saw it. Big as a broom. That means it's theirs, that house. That means you leave it alone."
"Who hung it, then?"
"Who do you think?"
Nobody answers that.
They talk about it all the way home. By dinner, the ice at the ford is as thin as paper. By supper, the man has gone in up to his eyebrows, and there were three of them under there, all white, with long hair like weed, holding on to his legs. By the next morning, a woman down by the mill has heard singing from under the ice, every night, for a week.
Fedya doesn't listen. When one of the old women laughs about the hands under the ice, he turns round and walks off, back towards our gate, with his hands in his pockets.
Masha doesn't listen to any of it. She goes out to the ice hole with the yoke and the buckets, the same as every day, and breaks the new ice off it with the scoop. On the way back, she stops at the top of the bank, with the buckets swinging, and looks down at the ford.
Down there, the hole where the man went through has already started to close. A grey skin, over black water.
On Monday morning, a boy comes running from the big house for my mother.
Efim has been coughing since Saturday night. Now he's hot, and he can't get his breath, and the housekeeper says come.
My mother takes the bag down from its nail. Masha already has her shawl on. She puts it on without a word, the way she always does, and goes out after our mother into the snow. She doesn't look at me. She doesn't look at Fedya.
They're gone all day.
They come back after dark. My mother sits down on the bench by the door with her boots still on, which she never does, and looks at her hands for a while. Then she gets up and washes them. She washes them for a long time.
"In his chest," she says to my father. "Both sides. He'll live."
My father is sitting by the stove. It's a while before he answers.
"Good," he says.
On the stove, in the dark, Masha tells us.
The house people live behind the stables, she says. In a long low house with one stove in the middle, and three families in it, with old sacks hung up between them on strings.
"He was on a bench by the stove," she whispers. "Mama put threads in. A lot of them. I held the lamp. He kept saying something under the ice had his legs. Mama told him to breathe."
She's quiet for a moment.
"His wife talked the whole time. He's been at the house since he was ten. When the papers come, the house people don't get any land. So he does whatever the steward tells him. Then maybe the steward keeps him on."
"There's four children. The little one has rags on her feet. There was half a sack of flour by the door, with the carter's mark on it."
Fedya doesn't say anything. Neither do I.
Masha turns over. After a while, her breathing slows down. Fedya's takes longer.
Mine takes longest of all.
On Saturday, at the evening bell, I'm in the black house with my hands in Rodya's tub.
The week's shoes hang on the peg over Osip's head. Fourteen pairs, on the string. Nobody looks at them. Everybody knows they're there.
The bell goes on. Ulyana is by the stove with the baby, rocking it harder than it needs.
Then Rodya's head comes up.
"Not the ice," he says. "The road. From the mill."
It's a long time before I can hear anything at all. Then boots, on the frozen road, coming from the wrong way. From the mill bridge, the long way round.
It isn't Efim. It's a boy from the house, about Masha's age, with big red ears and an empty sack. He stops at the gate for a long moment before he comes in. When he does, he leaves the door open behind him, and stands just inside it, as if he might need to go back out in a hurry.
"The house share," he says.
He doesn't take the string down himself. He waits until Osip gets up and hands it to him. Then he counts the pairs off it into his sack, with his lips moving. Two, four, six.
He stops.
He looks at the string, and at Osip, and at the door. Then he hangs it back on the peg, and goes, and doesn't bang the door. Out at the gate, he goes round the post with the wormwood on it the long way, like Buran going round Zhar.
Nobody moves.
Ulyana gets up, with the baby, and goes to the peg, and counts the pairs that are left. Then she counts them again.
"Eight," she says.
Osip sits down and picks up a strip. He looks at it for a moment. Then something happens in his beard that might be a smile.
"He was frightened," says Rodya.
"Of what?"
Rodya thinks about it, with his hands in the water.
"The gate," he says.
In April, the ice goes.
It goes in one night, with a noise like somebody dragging furniture across the sky. In the morning the stream is brown and high, and full of white slabs knocking into each other on their way to the river. At the ford, there's no white ice any more, and no dark strip. Only water, fast and loud, over the stones.
By Easter, the mud in the lane is up to Fedya's knees. Everybody goes round by the mill bridge. Even the people from the big house.
In the spring, the big house starts sending for my mother more.
Two days a week. Then three. Nobody says why. A boy comes to the door in the morning, and she takes her bag down from its nail and goes across the stream. She comes back after dark, and washes her hands, and doesn't talk.
But people in the village don't stop cutting themselves because my mother's across the stream. They don't stop burning themselves, or getting fevers, or having babies.
So they come to our door, and they find Masha.
The first one is the spoon-carver's boy.
It's the first week of the sowing. He's helping his father harrow the strip by the road, and he steps back onto the harrow without looking. One of the wooden teeth goes into his foot. Right in through the bottom, and out through the top.
His father carries him to our door with the foot wrapped in his own shirt. My mother is at the big house. Grandma is at the well. There's only Masha, at the stove, with the bread, and me.
Masha looks at the shirt. At the blood coming through it. At the empty nail by the door, where the bag usually hangs.
Then she puts the bread down.
"Water on to boil," she says to me. "The big pot. Now."
She has her own rags. A bundle of them, boiled and dried, on the shelf over the stove. She's had them there since the rye. Nobody told her to.
She washes her hands in the water from the morning, which has been boiled once already. She makes the spoon-carver wash his. She sits the boy on the bench and unwraps the foot, and the spoon-carver looks at it and goes grey and sits down on the floor.
The boy is screaming. Masha doesn't tell him to stop. She puts both thumbs on the top of his foot, on either side of the hole, and presses, hard, and counts under her breath. I know what she's counting. Our mother counts the same way.
When the bleeding slows, she washes the hole out with the boiled water, cooled in a bowl on the windowsill. The boy screams louder. Then she puts her fingers round the foot, very lightly, the way you'd hold a bird.
The threads come out of her fingertips.
I've seen them before, on my own knee. They still make the back of my neck go cold. Thin and pale, like the white roots you find when you pull up a weed. They go into the hole from both sides, feeling their way, and spread, and hold.
The spoon-carver crosses himself and looks at the wall.
The boy stops screaming. He sits on the bench with his mouth open and stares at his foot, at Masha's hands round it, and doesn't make a sound.
It takes a long time. Longer than it takes my mother. When Masha takes her hands away at last, the hole is still there, but it's shut, top and bottom. Pink and puffy, like a mouth pressed closed. She puts yarrow on it and binds it with the clean rags.
"Keep it dry," she says. Her voice is calm. Her doctor voice. "Don't walk on it till Sunday. If it goes hot, or red up the leg, or it smells, come back. Straight away. Don't wait."
The spoon-carver nods at everything. He picks his boy up and goes.
Masha sits down on the bench where the boy was. She looks at the blood on the floor, and doesn't get up.
I get the honey pot down from the shelf, and a spoon, and give it to her.
She looks at me, and laughs, a short laugh with no breath behind it.
"Sugar first," she says.
She eats it.
My mother comes home after dark, and Masha tells her everything. Standing by the stove, straight, like a soldier giving a report. My mother listens with her coat still on. Then she goes to the slop bucket and looks at the rags in it, and turns them over, and smells them.
"Boiled?"
"Twice."
My mother nods. She hangs up her coat. Then she sits down on the bench and puts her face in her hands.
She isn't crying. She just sits like that, for a few breaths.
Then she gets up and makes Masha eat another spoonful of honey.
The next morning, the spoon-carver is at our door again. He has two eggs in his cap. And a spoon. A new one, birch, pale and smooth, with a long handle and a little leaf carved where the handle meets the bowl.
"For the young healer," he says. He doesn't look at Masha when he says it. He looks at my mother.
My mother looks at Masha.
Masha takes it.
She keeps it in her apron pocket after that, all the time. I see her take it out sometimes, when she thinks nobody's looking, and run her thumb over the little leaf.
After that, they keep coming.
A little girl from down by the mill with a fever, hot as a stove. Masha boils willow bark for her and sits with her a night and a day. A woman who tipped a pot of boiling water over her own arm. Masha puts marsh cudweed on it, the small grey herb that grows at the edge of the bog. An old man with a cough. A boy with a fish hook through his thumb.
Not all of them need threads. Most of them need hot water, and clean rags, and somebody calm who knows what to do. Masha's good at calm.
They pay how they can. Eggs. A cabbage. A twist of salt. A bit of lard wrapped in a dock leaf. Sometimes a kopeck, warm from somebody's fist.
Once, in May, Matryona the midwife comes for her in the middle of the night.
My mother has a rule about that. She made it the week of the spoon-carver's boy, and she doesn't say why. Masha doesn't go out after dark on her own. Not to anybody. Not even to the Kuzmins'.
My father can't go. He's in the master's fields at dawn. So Fedya goes.
And where Fedya goes now, Zhar goes.
I'm not allowed. I lie on the stove and listen to them go. Masha's quick feet. Fedya's big ones. And four more, very soft, that you'd never hear at all if you didn't know they were there. Then Matryona, talking, all the way down the street, until the dark swallows her up.
They come back at dawn.
Masha is grey with tiredness. Fedya is carrying her bag, and a half sack of flour on his shoulder. Zhar is trotting at his knee, with a thin thread of smoke going up off his back into the morning.
On the stove, that afternoon, when everybody else is out, Masha tells me.
It was the miller's wife. Her fourth. It came wrong, feet first, and it took all night. Matryona did the turning. She talked the whole time. To the miller's wife, to the baby, to the saints, to the cat. Matryona can't stop talking. Everybody knows that. Grandma says it's her age. The old women at the well say she was born with her mouth open. Masha told me once, when I was too small to answer, that too much magic makes you funny. I think Masha's closest.
"Then it came out," says Masha, "and the blood didn't stop."
She says it very flat. I wait.
"Matryona looked at me. And I thought, Mama isn't here. Mama's across the stream. It's me." She looks at her hands. "So I did what Mama did when you were born. Yarrow. Then the threads. A lot of them. Until it stopped."
"And it stopped."
"It stopped." She lets out a long breath. "It's a boy. They're calling him Grisha."
The miller pays with the flour. And with a silver coin. Twenty kopecks, with the Tsar's eagle on it.
Masha lifts the board herself, that evening, with all of us watching. She puts the coin in the pot. Then she puts the board back, and presses it flat with her foot, the way our father does.
In June, for the first time since the autumn, the pot is bigger than it was.
My mother counts what Masha brings home every week, and never says anything about it. But after every call, when Masha comes in, my mother looks at her face. Hard, in the light from the window, the way she looks at a cut to see if it's going bad.
Then she puts the honey on the table.
In the spring, Fedya turns twelve.
Twelve is the age for Gavrila's class. Every Saturday evening, in the guild hall in winter and the yard in summer, Gavrila teaches the village boys who want to be hunters one day. Knots. Tracks. How to stand with a spear, and how to fall without breaking your arm. Which way the wind has to blow before you go near a den. Every monster is a question, he says. Find out what the question is.
Fedya has been going to that class for years, from the loft over the back room, where Gavrila pretended not to hear him. Now he stands in the line with the others. He's the youngest. The big boys made jokes about that, the first Saturday.
Then Zhar came and lay down at the end of the line, and the jokes stopped.
Zhar comes up to Fedya's waist now. His fur has gone darker, the grey of a fire the morning after, and he's all legs. When he walks, the grass goes pale behind him, then comes back slowly, the way grass does after frost. He still eats from Fedya's hand and nobody else's. He lets the rest of us touch him, if Fedya nods.
I watch the class from the woodpile.
Gavrila pretends not to see me, the way he pretended not to hear us in the loft.
At the end of June, the boars come out of the forest.
It's the iron road's fault. Everybody says so. When they built the line, the Department cut a road through the forest for the line, wider than the church is long, and burned what they cut. The boars used to live in the deep wood behind the marsh. Now there's a long open cut through the middle of it, full of new grass and young birch, and the boars walk along it like a street. At the end of the street, there's our oats.
The first night, they take half the Kuzmins' strip. The second night, they take the miller's. They don't eat it so much as plough it. In the morning, the young oats are torn up in long black rows, as if somebody went over the field with a harrow made of shovels.
Iron-mane boars. I've seen their hair on the tree trunks, in the forest with Gavrila, last summer. Stiff, rust-red bristles, like bits of old wire.
On the third morning, Kirill and two of the old men go to the guild with their caps in their hands.
That's the guild's work. Everybody knows that too. When something comes out of the forest, the guild goes in after it.
Gavrila takes five men. Timofey, with his sword. The two from the river road, with their old guns. Two from the guild, with spears. The heads of the spears are my father's work, with his bite marks cut into them, wide and heavy, with an iron bar across the shaft below the blade. Rogatinas, they call them. Bear spears. The bar is so the animal can't run up the shaft and get you, even with the spear right through it.
And he takes Fedya.
Not to fight. Fedya climbs better than anybody in the village, and the oat field has a big birch at the forest end. Somebody has to sit up there with a horn and say when they're coming.
"Up the tree," says Gavrila. "And you stay up the tree. Whatever happens. If I see your feet on the ground, I'll tie you to it."
"And Zhar?"
Gavrila looks at the wolf, lying across the guild door with his chin on his paws.
"Where you go, that goes. I know." He sighs. "Under the tree, then. The pair of you. It's the only place I want either of you."
They set out from the guild yard at sunset. Half the village comes to watch. So do I, holding Grandma's hand.
Gavrila is already dressed for the forest. He has the black gloves on, the ones he wears every time he goes in, and the old greased boots. I've seen them on him all my life. Tonight, for the first time, I'm close enough to see what's on them.
On the back of each glove, sewn into the leather, there's a little plate of grey metal no bigger than my thumbnail, with marks cut into it. Not my father's marks. I know my father's. These are smaller, and older, and closer together. When he puts one foot up on the edge of the trough to pull a strap tight, I see the sole of his boot. Rows of small iron studs, and on the head of every stud, a mark.
"With the gloves, your gun doesn't shake," Fedya whispers to me. He's in the class now. He knows everything. "Not when you breathe. Not when you're scared. Not when it's coming straight at you. And the boots don't slip. Ice, mud, wet grass. Nothing."
"Where did he get them?"
"In the city. Years ago. When he still went deep into the forest for money."
My mother is standing at the back of the crowd, with her shawl pulled close. She's looking at the gloves.
Before they go, Gavrila takes a tin box out of the pouch on his belt. He gives each of the river-road men two little twists of paper out of it. They're the size of my finger, sealed at both ends with brown wax, and there's a tiny mark pressed into the wax.
"Powder for the pan," says Gavrila. He taps the little hollow by the flint, where the spark goes. "Dew gets into plain powder, and then your gun won't fire. It can't get into these. Rain can't. But you open one when you need it, and not before. Each one of those costs more than your gun."
The older one looks at the twists in his hand. Then he puts them away inside his coat, like Grandma putting away a coin.
I watch the little grey plates on the backs of his hands until the hunters are out of the yard and I can't see them any more.
A glove that keeps a man's hands still. A sole that holds on ice. I don't know how. A rune is a promise, my father says. I don't know what a glove promises, or how it keeps it.
That night, Fedya's place on the stove is empty. My mother doesn't say a word. She hasn't said a word since he told her.
From the top of the birch, Fedya could see the hunters lying at the edge of the oat field, in the long grass under the forest, where the wind came to them off the field and not the other way.
It was one of the shortest nights of the year. The sky never went fully dark. It stayed a deep grey-blue, with a white moon low over the marsh, and in that light the young oats looked like water.
Fedya sat in the birch, with the cow's horn in his lap. His legs had gone to sleep an hour ago. He didn't move them.
The boars came after midnight.
He smelled them first. Something sour and heavy, like wet iron. Then he heard them. A sound like a crowd of people walking through tall grain, not caring who heard. Then he saw them, coming out of the forest along the cut in a long dark line. A dozen. More. The small ones in the middle. And at the front, a big one. Much bigger than the rest. Along its back, from its head to its tail, its mane stood up stiff, and in the moonlight it shone dull red, like a row of rusty nails.
Fedya blew the horn.
The dogs went in. The boars broke and scattered across the field, squealing. One of the young ones came straight at the hunters out of the oats, mad with the noise. Gavrila stood up in the long grass to meet it. The gun didn't move in his hands. Not when he breathed. Not when the boar was ten steps off and coming. He fired, once, twice, and it went down and didn't get up.
The big one didn't run.
It stood in the middle of the oats with its head down and turned to look at the noise. Then it came. Not fast at first. Then fast.
The older river-road man had it in his sights. At dusk, Fedya had watched him prime it from his own horn, with Gavrila's wax twists still tucked inside his coat. He pulled the trigger. The flint struck and sparked, and nothing happened. The dew had got into the powder in the pan.
He swore and pulled again. Nothing.
Gavrila was three steps away, with both barrels empty. He didn't reload. He looked at the other man's gun. At the little pan of wet powder, by the flint.
The powder caught.
It went up with a hiss and a flash, and the gun went off in the man's hands, so suddenly that he nearly dropped it. The ball hit the boar high on the back and struck the mane, and sang away into the dark like a stone off a frozen pond.
The boar didn't even slow down.
Timofey stepped out in front of it with his sword. He cut once, low, under the mane, where the hide was only hide. Papa's runes bit. The blade went in deep, and blood came out black in the moonlight. Then the boar hit him, and Timofey went up into the air and came down on his back in the oats, and the sword went somewhere else.
A dog went in at the boar's throat. The boar swung its head, and the dog flew sideways and lay where it fell, screaming.
Then the boar turned back to Timofey, on the ground.
Something came out from under the birch, low and fast, with smoke pouring off its back.
"Zhar!" Fedya screamed, from the top of the tree. "Zhar, no!"
Zhar didn't go for the head. He went for the back leg, the way the ash wolves go for an elk, and set his teeth in above the hoof. Where he held on, the bristles smoked, and the hide went black and blistered. The boar shrieked and spun round after him. It dragged him through the oats, round and round, trying to get its tusks to him. Its tusk caught him once across the shoulder, and Zhar yelped, and didn't let go.
Fedya came down the birch so fast that he took the skin off both his hands, and ran.
Gavrila was already moving. He had no shot, and no spear, and no time. He threw down the gun.
The oats were flattened and soaked with dew, as slick as soap. The second river-road man had gone down twice just turning round. Gavrila didn't slip. His boots went into the wet ground and held, every step, as if each one had been nailed down. He came in on the boar's side while it was spinning after Zhar, three steps off, close enough to look into its eye.
A small eye. Red-brown, and wet, and furious.
Find out where it keeps its warmth. Fedya had heard Gavrila say it every Saturday since the spring.
He lifted his hand, fingers spread, and looked at the eye.
The boar's eye went white. All at once, like the white of an egg dropped into a hot pan.
The boar screamed. It was a terrible sound, much too high for something so big. Zhar let go and rolled away into the oats. The boar threw its head round and round, blind on that side, and ran. Not at Timofey. Not at Gavrila. Not at Fedya, running across the field towards the wolf. Straight ahead.
Straight onto the guild man's spear.
He had it braced against the ground, with his foot on the end, the way Gavrila taught them. The iron bar caught. The shaft bent, and held. The bite runes did the rest.
The boar went down slowly, the way a tree goes, and lay in the oats, and kicked, and stopped.
For a moment, nobody moved.
Fedya was on his knees in the middle of the field, with both arms round Zhar's neck and the blood from the wolf's shoulder all down his shirt.
Gavrila turned round.
"Did I tell you to come down?"
It wasn't his voice. It was louder than his voice, and higher, and it came out of him like something tearing.
"Did I? Did I tell you? Get back up that tree! Get back up it, or I'll put you up it myself!"
Fedya didn't move. He knelt there with his arms round Zhar and stared up at him.
Gavrila wasn't finished. He turned on the river-road man, and the gun, and the wet powder. He shouted that the man was a fool, that his father was a fool, that if he ever saved those twists again with a boar coming at him, he could go and fight the boars with his teeth. He kicked the gun across the grass. He hit the trunk of the birch with his fist, so hard that the leaves shook all the way to the top.
His face was dark red. In the moonlight, his eyes caught red for a moment, like a coal when you blow on it.
Nobody said anything back. Not even the river-road man.
Timofey got up out of the oats, slowly, holding his ribs. He came and stood beside Fedya.
"Leave him," he said. "Leave him be a bit, Fedya."
Gavrila stood there breathing, with his fists shut. Then he went and knelt down by the dog in the oats. He put his hands on it, very gently.
His hands were shaking.
In the morning, there are two dead boars on the ground in the guild yard, and a crowd round them.
The young one is just a pig. A big, ugly, hairy pig.
The big one isn't.
It's longer than a cart. Its tusks curve up out of its mouth like a pair of sickles, yellow, with dirt still in the cracks. Its mane runs all along its back, a hand high, stiff and red-brown. When I touch it, it doesn't bend. It's cold and hard, like a brush made of wire. When I take my hand away, there's red on my fingers.
Rust.
Iron, in the hair of a living thing. Enough of it to rust in the dew.
I don't know where a pig gets the iron for that. I don't know how it gets it out of its blood and into its hair. I put it on the shelf with the others, where things go that I can't explain yet.
One of its eyes is brown. The other one is white all through, like a boiled egg.
The dog is alive. It's lying in the kennel shed with Masha's threads in its side, because Masha came at dawn with her rags and nobody told her not to. Zhar is lying outside the shed door, watching it. There's a long cut across his shoulder, stitched with the same threads. Where the stitches are, a little smoke still comes up.
The people round the boars keep looking at him. They've heard. Everybody's heard. The wolf went in under the big one's tusks.
At the back of the crowd, there's a boy from the big house. The one with the red ears. He looks at Zhar for a long time. Then he goes back across the stream at a run.
Fedya is sitting on the woodpile, with his hands wrapped in rags of his own.
"He didn't even get close," he says. "Three steps. He just put his hand out, like this." He flicks his fingers at the woodpile. "One go. Like spitting."
I look at my hands.
Holding it where you put it, I think. I don't say it.
Then he stops.
"He shouted at me," he says.
"You came down the tree."
"For Zhar. I came down for Zhar." Fedya looks at the guild door. "It wasn't that. He's shouted at me before. Lots of times." He frowns. "It was his eyes. Like he couldn't see me. Like I was the boar." He picks at the rag on his hand. "He's been like that all night. He shouted at Timofey for bleeding on the floor."
Gavrila comes out of the guild door. His face is grey, the way a face gets when it hasn't slept. He sees Fedya on the woodpile, and stops, and looks at him. Then he rubs his face with both hands, hard, and goes back in.
I sit next to Fedya on the woodpile and don't say anything.
I know what it is. I don't have a name for it. But I've felt it. On the meadow, with a soldier in front of me. On the ice at the ford, with my hands flat on the white. Two fingers at the back of my neck, very calm.
Mine comes cold. Gavrila's came hot.
That evening, Gavrila comes to our forge.
He stands in the doorway. He's too big for it. He always is. Then he holds out his hand to Fedya. There's a tusk in it. One of the big ones, from the boar, scraped clean.
Fedya takes the tusk. He sleeps with it under his pillow for a week.
In July, the haymaking comes round again.
It's the same as last year. The master's meadows first, four days a week, with the men in a line and the scythes going. Our own thin strip by the forest after. The same sorrel in the grass. The same train in the afternoon, and the same faces behind the glass.
Only my father doesn't stop at the end of the rows any more, with his hand on his side. And I'm big enough to throw hay now. Not far. But up.
On the third day, a man rides along the edge of the field with the watchman from the striped hut walking beside his horse.
He's in a dark green coat with brass buttons. A Department man. Not one of the diggers. His boots are too clean for a digger, and he has a leather bag over his shoulder, and spectacles that flash when he turns his head. The watchman points down the strips, and then points at us.
The man gets down off his horse and walks over through the stubble. He stops in front of my father.
"Are you the smith?"
My father puts down his scythe. "Yes."
"Thirty plates for the causeway. With the rust mark on them." The man takes something out of his bag. It's a plate, grey and flaking, eaten through in two places so you can see the sky through the holes. "This is one of ours. From the dry end of the line. It's been in the ground eighteen months." He puts it away again. "Yours have been in the marsh for two years, under every train that goes by. I've been out there with a lamp and a hammer. I can't find a speck of rust on any of them."
My father looks at the man's hands. Soft hands, with ink on one finger.
"How long will the mark hold?" says the man.
"As long as I promised it."
The man looks at him for a moment. Then he takes out a little book, with a green cover, and a pencil.
"Your name?"
That's when the steward comes.
He's been in the master's meadow, across the stream. Somebody must have run to tell him. He comes along the edge of the field on his horse at a trot, and pulls up, and smiles down at the Department man. The first kind of smile.
"Good day, sir. Can I help you? The smith is the master's man. Any work goes through the house."
"So I understand," says the Department man. He doesn't look up from his book. "Until the spring, I'm told." He writes. "Your name?" he says again, to my father.
My father tells him. All of it. His name, and his father's name, and the village.
The Department man writes it down, and shuts the book, and puts it back in his bag. He nods to the steward. He nods to my father. Then he gets back on his horse and rides away along the line, towards the marsh, with the watchman trotting beside him.
The steward watches him go. Then he looks at my father.
He doesn't say anything. He turns his horse and goes back to the master's hay.
My father picks up his scythe.
He goes on mowing all afternoon. Row after row, and he doesn't stop, and he doesn't look up. But at the end of each row, before he turns, he looks along the field towards the iron road.
That night, in the field, under the green sky, Grandma hums. My father doesn't hum with her. He lies on his back with his hands behind his head and his eyes open.
I lie in the hay and think about books.
When I was born, Father Ivan wrote me in God's book, and the steward wrote me in the master's. Two books. My mother has been in the master's book longer than I've been alive.
Now my father is in a third one. A little one, with a green cover.
At the beginning of October, after the Protection, the feast when the old women say the first snow should come, the steward sends for Zhar.
It's a fine day. No snow at all. The birches round the guild yard have gone yellow, and the leaves come down every time the wind blows, and Zhar lies in them by the shed door and watches them fall.
He's nearly grown now. Long and thin, with long legs and a long narrow head. Across his shoulder there's a pale line where the tusk went in, and no fur grows on it. He still smokes. Only a thread, on a calm day. When he lies in the leaves, the leaves under him go grey and curl up at the edges.
The steward comes with his two big men, and with somebody new. A thin man with a long whip coiled on his shoulder, and a pole with a loop of rope on the end. He smells of dogs. A lot of dogs. He's the master's huntsman, from the kennels behind the big house.
Fedya is in the yard. So am I. Gavrila comes out of the guild door, slowly, and stands on the step.
"The master's wolf," says the steward. "As agreed."
"So that's the one that went under the iron-mane," says the huntsman.
He looks at Zhar. Zhar looks at him. The smoke on his back gets a little thicker.
The huntsman knows his work. I can see that. He doesn't rush. He comes across the yard low and slow, talking under his breath, the pole out in front of him. When he's close enough, he puts the loop over Zhar's head, very neat, and pulls.
Zhar flattens to the ground.
The smoke comes off him in a thick grey sheet. The leaves under him go black. He twists once, hard, like a fish on a line, and gets his teeth round the pole. Where his teeth are, the wood starts to smoke too. The huntsman pulls. Zhar pulls back, with his feet in the leaves and his eyes gone red, and a sound coming out of him that isn't a growl. It's lower than that. Like a stove door, opened in the night.
The rope burns through.
Zhar is across the yard before the end of it hits the ground. He doesn't go for the huntsman. He goes to Fedya. He stands against Fedya's legs, pressed tight, and faces the yard, with his back smoking and every hair up.
Fedya puts his hand down on the back of his neck.
His hand is shaking. I can see it from the woodpile. But he breathes, in, and out, slowly, the way he learned in the winter. His face goes flat. His shoulders come down.
After a while, the smoke on Zhar's back gets thinner.
The huntsman looks at the end of his rope. It's black and curled, like a burnt wick.
"It eats from the boy's hand," says Gavrila, from the step. "Nobody else's. I told your master's man that in the winter."
The huntsman coils what's left of the rope. He doesn't look at Gavrila. He looks at the steward.
"I'm not taking that into the master's kennels. Not without the boy. It'll kill every hound he's got." He spits in the leaves. "Or they'll kill it."
The steward looks at Fedya for a long time, the way he looked at the forge. At the coal, and the scrap, and the empty bench. He's counting something. I can see him counting.
"Then the boy goes too," he says.
Fedya goes white.
"The boy's in my class," says Gavrila. His voice is very even. "And every winter, when the wolves come, the master needs the guild. Ask him who'll go after them, if he takes my boys."
The steward doesn't answer. His eyes go from Fedya to Zhar, to the black leaves, to the burnt rope.
In the spring the paper comes. After that, nobody at the big house knows what will still be the master's, and what won't. Not even the steward.
"It stays here," he says at last. "For now."
He takes out his book and writes something in it.
"It's the master's wolf," he says, putting the book away. "When the master wants it for a hunt, it goes up to the house. With the boy, or without him."
They go. The huntsman goes last, with the pole over his shoulder and the burnt rope hanging off it.
Fedya sits down in the leaves, all at once, as if somebody has cut his strings. Zhar lies down next to him and puts his long head across Fedya's knees.
Fedya puts both arms round his neck and doesn't let go.
The snow comes at the end of October this year, early and deep. By December, the drifts are up to the windows.
Today, I'm six.
Masha is fifteen. She's as tall as my mother now, and some days, from behind, at the stove, I can't tell which one of them it is. Fedya is twelve. His voice has finished breaking. It's a deep voice now, too deep for his face, and he's stopped hating it. He uses it on the dogs.
Sitrep, then. It's been a while.
Date: December, snow up to the windows. Age: six. Height: up to Grandma's chest when she's standing up. Feet: Fedya's old felt boots, no straw in the toes. Sleeves: halfway down my arms. Grandma has let the hems down twice, and there's nothing left to let down. Speech: fluent, except for the R. Fedya still tests it every morning. Range: six steps, on a good day. Reach: the latch on our door, on my toes. Personnel: two parents, one grandmother, one sister, one brother. One friend who can't see, and one wolf who isn't ours. Everybody alive.
Still worth writing down.
The latch is the best one. A whole year of waiting by that door for somebody taller to come along. Now I just open it.
Grandma makes the fish pie.
Masha gives me a honey cake. A real one, from the pedlar woman who comes through before Christmas. Brown and shiny, in the shape of a horse, with a pattern pressed into its back. Masha bought it with her own money.
I can't eat it. Not straight away. I put it on the shelf by the window and look at it.
Fedya gives me a tooth.
"It's real this time," he says. "It's Zhar's. He lost it in the summer. A baby one." He's gone a bit red. "I kept it for you."
It's small and sharp and grey, the colour of ash. When I hold it in my hand, it's warm. Warmer than my hand.
I keep it with the other one. The dog's tooth from last year. I keep both.
Then my father takes me out to the forge.
The doorpost is cold. Snow has got into the cracks of the wood. He stands me against it with my back straight and lays his knife flat on top of my head, the way he did last year, and cuts.
Then he stands back so I can see.
There's last year's mark. And there's this year's, above it. Three fingers above it. More, nearly.
Below them both, near the bottom, the two short marks, old and dark.
My father puts his hand on my head, like a hat.
"Six," he says.
Rodya comes in the afternoon. Ulyana brings him to the door, the same as last year, and leaves him on the step, the same as last year, because of the baby. He has something under his arm again. Something wrapped in a bit of sack.
It's a pair of bast shoes. Small ones. My size.
"My first whole pair," he says. "Papa didn't do any of it. Not even the end."
I turn them over. They're good. Tight and even, the strips going over and under. Near the heel of the left one, there's a place where the weave goes wrong for a few rows, and then comes right again. A place where somebody went wrong, and felt it with his fingers, and pulled it out, and started again.
I run my thumb over it.
"There's a bit by the heel," says Rodya. "I know."
"I like that bit."
He thinks about that. Then he grins.
That night, when everybody is asleep, I lie on the stove and try the hum.
Just a little. A bead of frost on the end of my finger, in the dark, where nobody can see. It comes the moment I ask for it now. Last winter it took me ten slow breaths.
The hum is bigger, too. A lot bigger. Last winter it was a fly in a jar. Now it fills the jar. A year ago, I couldn't hold a line three steps along the ice. This year I held one for six, with a man moving at the end of it.
My body hasn't kept up. On the doorpost, this year's mark is only three fingers above last year's.
It's not hard to work out why. Bones are built out of protein. In our house, protein is an egg on Sunday, if the hens are laying, and meat at Christmas and Easter. The rest is bread and kasha and cabbage, and half the days of the year are fasting days anyway. Nobody here is short, exactly. Everybody is just a bit less than they could have been.
Ten months since the ford. Five months since the Department man wrote my father's name in his little green book.
Three months to the paper.
In February, it's Maslenitsa.
Butter week. The last week before Lent, when you can still eat butter and eggs and milk, so everybody does, all week, as much as they can. Every house makes pancakes. Our whole house smells of hot butter from morning to night. Grandma stands at the stove with the pan and flips them, and they go onto the plate in a heap, thin and brown and full of holes, and the heap never gets any taller, because Fedya.
The young men pour water down the bank behind the church, every night, until it's a long hill of ice. Everybody goes sledding. The little ones on boards. The big boys on a door that somebody took off a barn. The girls on their mothers' trays, screaming the whole way down.
Rodya has never been on the hill.
"I can hear it," he says, at the top, with his hand on my shoulder. "It's a long noise. It's a long, long noise."
Fedya has our sled. He gets on the front. I get on behind him, and Rodya behind me, with his arms round my middle.
"Hold on," says Fedya.
We go.
It's very fast. Faster than anything has been, in this life. The cold hits my face like water. The bank goes past in a white streak, and the sled hits a bump and leaves the ice altogether, and comes down with a crack, and Rodya is screaming in my ear. Not frightened. The other kind.
"Rodya!" I shout. "Hold on! Rodya!"
He holds on.
At the bottom, we tip over into the snow, all three of us, in a heap. Fedya is laughing. I'm laughing. Rodya is lying on his back with snow on his face and his arms out.
Then he sits up.
"Say it again," he says.
"Say what?"
"My name."
"Rodya."
He goes quiet. He's listening, the way he listens for the line in a strip.
"You said it right," he says. "Rodya. With the R." He turns his face towards me. "All this time, you've been calling me Lodya. Did you know?"
I did know. I hated it. I didn't know he did.
"You never said."
"Why would I?" He shrugs. "It was you saying it."
The next morning, Fedya does his test. He's done it every morning for four years.
"Ryba," he says. Fish. "Go on."
"Ryba."
It comes out right. The R rolls like a small engine, just as it did in my old life.
Fedya looks at me for a long moment.
"Again."
"Ryba."
He lies back on the stove and looks at the ceiling.
"Now what am I going to do in the mornings?" he says.
On the last day of the week, it's Forgiveness Sunday. Everybody goes round and bows to everybody, and asks them to forgive whatever they did in the year. You say, forgive me. They say, God will forgive.
Masha bows to my mother.
"Forgive me, Mama."
My mother looks at her. Then she puts her hand on Masha's head, the way my father puts his on mine.
"God will forgive," she says. "And so will I."
That night, on the hill behind the church, they burn the straw woman for the end of butter week. Then Lent starts, and the butter's gone, and the pancakes are gone, and there's only cabbage again.
And in the second week of Lent, the gentleman from the town comes back.
He comes on a Sunday, after the service, in a sleigh with a bearskin over his knees.
It's the same gentleman who rode along the edge of our fields last winter, with the steward and the men with the chain. Close up, he's older than I thought. A long fur coat, and a fur hat, and a grey beard trimmed short. Round his neck, on a chain, there's a brass badge, like a priest's cross but round.
The steward rides beside the sleigh. The clerk sits in the back with a box on his knees.
Everybody is already in front of the church. Nobody had to be told. The whole village has known for a week what day it would be.
I stand between Fedya and my father, near the front. Masha is with my mother and Grandma, behind us. Rodya is somewhere at the back, with Osip. I can't see him. I know he's listening.
In my textbook, the gentleman with the badge was called a peace arbitrator. A local nobleman, chosen to stand between the masters and the peasants and see that the paper was fair. In the textbook, he was one of the good things.
The clerk opens the box and takes out a paper. A big one, folded many times, with a red seal hanging off the bottom on a string. He gives it to the arbitrator. The arbitrator unfolds it, and puts on his spectacles, and reads.
He reads for a long time.
He reads the way people read papers aloud when they've read a lot of them. Fast, and flat, without looking up. In the master's language. Allotment. Desyatinas. Male souls per the last revision. Lands in use before the date above. Lands set aside to the proprietor's portion. Dues in money. Redemption by agreement, through the Treasury.
I understand every word. I'm the only one in the crowd who does, I think, except the steward.
Nobody else moves. They stand in the snow with their hats in their hands and their faces turned up, the way they stood in the church on the day of the paper two years ago. They're listening as hard as they can. I can see it in their faces.
Old Kirill is at the front, as the elder. His lips move after the arbitrator's, as if he can hold the words in his mouth and look at them later.
When the arbitrator stops, nobody says anything.
Then Kirill clears his throat.
"Your honour," he says. "Forgive us. We're dark people. What does it say?"
The arbitrator looks at the steward.
The steward says it for him. In plain words. And the plain words are worse.
Every soul on the old list gets so much land. A strip in each field. The same strips we have now, near enough. The meadow by the river, the good one, where the grass comes up to your waist, goes to the master's side of the line. So does the wood behind the mill. So does the pasture by the stream. You can rent them from the house, if you want them. At the house's price.
Until you buy your land, you pay the master as before. Ten roubles a soul, every year.
If you want to buy, you can. A fifth to the master, in money, at once. The rest the Treasury pays him for you. And you pay the Treasury back. Every year. For forty-nine years.
The old women at the well said it last winter. The master will keep the good meadow by the river and give us the sand.
Somebody at the back says, "And where's the Tsar's land?"
Nobody answers. The arbitrator folds his spectacles.
"The village will put its mark to the charter," he says. "To show it has been read and understood."
Kirill looks at the paper. He looks at the pen the clerk is holding out to him. He looks at the ground, the way he always does.
"And if the village doesn't put its mark?" he says.
"Then the charter stands without it." The arbitrator says it kindly. "It's the law, grandfather. Your mark is for your own sake. So nobody can say later that you didn't hear it."
Kirill takes the pen. He holds it the way you'd hold a spoon you'd never seen before. Then he bends over the paper on the clerk's box, and makes a cross. Slowly. Two lines.
Then the clerk gives the pen to the next man.
There's one more thing.
The arbitrator reads it from a second paper, shorter. The house people. The ones who live behind the stables, and cook, and clean, and carry, and drive. From this day they're free. They're no longer bound to the house, nor the house to them. They may go where they like.
It doesn't say anything about land.
The house people are standing together, off to the side, by the churchyard wall. Three families. The cook. The boy with the red ears.
And Efim.
He's still thinner than he was last winter. His wife is next to him. The little girl is on his arm, wrapped in a shawl, and her feet are sticking out at the bottom. She isn't wearing rags on them any more.
She's wearing bast shoes. Small ones. New.
I know that weave. I've had my hands in the water with those strips.
Efim isn't looking at the arbitrator. He's looking at the ground in front of his feet. Like Kirill. When the paper is finished, he lifts his head.
He looks straight at my father.
I feel my father go still beside me. Not angry. Just still. Like a dog that hears something in the dark.
They look at each other across the snow. Nobody moves. I can feel Fedya beside me, not breathing.
Efim looks away first.
He shifts the little girl on his arm, and turns, and goes. Not past us. The other way. Along the churchyard wall, towards the mill, the long way round. His wife goes after him, and the other house people after her, in a line, the way you'd go out of a house where somebody has died.
My father watches him all the way to the corner.
Then he puts his hat back on.
That night, Grandma counts the pot.
She tips it out on the table, the way she did in the autumn before last, and sorts it into heaps. Silver. Copper. Bent copper. Masha's coin from the miller, with the eagle. Fedya's kopecks. Mine. The silver from my father's evenings, before the evenings stopped.
We all watch her lips move.
I don't have to watch. I've done the sum already, standing in the snow, while the arbitrator was still reading. Two souls on the old list. My father, and Fedya. I'm not on it. I'm on the master's list, but not the Tsar's. Ten roubles a soul, twenty for the house. At six in a hundred, that's three hundred and thirty-three roubles, and some kopecks. A fifth of that to the master, at once. Sixty-six roubles and sixty-seven kopecks.
"Seventy-one," says Grandma. "And copper."
Nobody cheers.
"And then sixteen a year," I say. "For forty-nine years."
Everybody looks at me.
Nobody asks how I know. My father has been doing the same sum in his head all afternoon, slower, on his fingers under the table. I saw him.
"Forty-nine years," says my father.
He says it to the table.
"Fedya will be an old man. Kolya will be an old man." He laughs. It isn't a real laugh. "I'll be long dead, and they'll still be paying for the meadow they didn't get."
"Stepan," says Grandma.
"What?"
"The Tsar gave the land. He wanted us to have it." Grandma's hands are flat on the heaps of coins, as if they might blow away. "Father Ivan said so. This morning. Take it with thanks, he said. As from God's hand. It's the masters who—"
"Whose name is on the paper, Mama?"
He isn't loud yet.
"It's his name at the bottom. It was his name at the bottom two years ago. It's his name today." He stands up. The bench scrapes. "God's hand. Whose hand cut the meadow? Whose hand gave the house people the door, and nothing else? Was that God's hand too? Father Ivan's going to tell me to thank him for that?"
Now he's loud.
"Thank him? For forty-nine years? I'll thank him! I'll thank him when—"
"Not under the icons," says Grandma.
She says it very quietly. She doesn't look at him. She looks at the corner, where the lamp is lit under the saints, and under the saints, the cheap picture of the Tsar, so black with soot that only the crown shows.
My father stops.
He stands there with his fists on the table, breathing. I watch it go out of him.
He sits down.
Nobody says anything. The lamp ticks.
Grandma gets up, slowly, with her hand on the table. She goes to the corner and stands in front of the icons. Her lips move. She crosses herself, three times. She doesn't bow to the picture of the Tsar. She doesn't take it down either. She just stands there, looking at it.
Then she comes back and starts putting the coins back in the pot. One heap at a time.
"We buy," says my father. "Then it's ours. What's ours, nobody can cut again."
My mother puts her hand on his, on the table.
Masha is looking at the heap of copper, at her coin with the eagle on it, as Grandma sweeps it into the pot.
"Sixteen a year," she says. "And salt. And flour, when ours runs out. And the axe handle." She doesn't look at my mother. "A healer with a party gets silver, Mama."
My mother doesn't answer this time. She just keeps her hand on my father's, and looks at the lamp.
A week later, at dusk, somebody knocks at our door.
Nobody knocks at our door. People shout from the gate, or come in. Grandma looks at my mother, and my mother looks at my father, and my father gets up and opens it.
It's the watchman from the striped hut. He has snow on his shoulders, and a paper in his hand, folded small, with a green seal.
"For the smith," he says. "From the Department. I'm to read it to him." He looks a bit embarrassed. "They said you might not have the letters."
My father stands aside, and the watchman comes in, and stands by the stove in his wet boots, and unfolds the paper, and reads.
It's short. The Department's workshops in the city. The rail shop, where they make and mend the iron for the line. A smith with a sure hand for rust marks is wanted. Ten roubles a month, in silver. A bed in the workmen's barracks. The fare on the train, paid. A passport, arranged. To report after Easter.
At the bottom, two names I don't know. One of them, I think, belongs to the man with the green book.
The watchman folds the paper and holds it out. My father takes it. He looks at it, at the lines of writing he can't read, as if they might say something different if he looks long enough.
"Ten roubles," says Grandma. "A month."
"Silver," says Fedya.
Nobody else says anything.
The watchman goes. He says goodnight at the door, and nobody answers him, and he goes out into the snow. I hear his boots go away down the lane.
Ten roubles a month. In a year, that's more than the whole pot. Nearly twice over.
And a bed in a barracks, in the city at the end of the iron road. After Easter. On his own.
My mother is looking at my father. My father is looking at the paper.
"Go," says my mother.
He looks up.
"Go," she says again. Almost a whisper. "They want your hands. Not the master. Not the steward. Them." She swallows. "Go, Styopa."
My father puts the paper down on the table. He smooths it flat with his big black hand. Then he gets up, and takes his coat, and goes out to the forge.
After a while, I go after him.
It's dark in there. The fire is banked, and there's only a little red light in the coals. He's standing by the anvil with his hand flat on it, the way my mother puts her hand on a sick child.
He hears me in the door.
He doesn't say anything. He doesn't send me back to bed. He holds out his other arm, and I go and stand under it, against his side, where the ribs mended.
We stand there. The coals tick.
Then he puts his hand on my head. The whole of it, like a hat.
On the stove, in the dark, I can't sleep.
Masha is on one side of me. Fedya on the other. Grandma is snoring down below on the bench. My mother and father are behind the curtain. They aren't asleep either. I can hear them not talking.
I do what I do now, when I can't sleep. I count breaths.
Fedya. Masha. Grandma. My mother.
My father.
Five.
In the dream, in the nothing, there was no one. No breaths at all. Only me, in the dark, for ever. Here there are five. I count them again, slowly.
Five.
Then I let it in. All of it, the way Rodya taught me. The stove, warm under my back. The wind in the chimney. The five of them, breathing.
And the thing I felt in the hayfield, that summer night with the green sky. The thing I don't have a name for. It's still there. Small, and warm, going round between them in the dark.
Only my father's part of it has turned a little. Towards the window.
I lie between my brother and my sister and hold on to it as hard as I can.
After Easter, I'll be counting four.