The Republic of Birds Read online

  The hut comes closer and I feel myself prickling all over—with fear, certainly, but also with a spiky excitement. Am I about to see a real, live yaga?

  The other passengers are calm, almost bored-looking, as if they see yagas every other day of the week. But Anastasia has covered her eyes with her diamond-encrusted fingers and her shoulders are shaking. Mira’s eyes brim with frightened tears. Even Father looks afraid. His moustache trembles at its corners.

  What is wrong with me? I shouldn’t be excited. I definitely shouldn’t look excited. Girls have been sent to Bleak Steppe for less. I wobble my lip and wring my hands. I’m not as good an actress as Anastasia, but I think it will do.

  ‘Is it…?’ asks Mira.

  ‘It is,’ I say.

  ‘No need to panic,’ says Father in a low voice. ‘Eyes ahead, Olga.’

  I turn my face forward, but from the corner of my eye I can see almost everything.

  The hut’s window is hidden behind rotting wooden shutters, but all at once the shutters fall open. As if by magic, I think. And then I think, well, of course by magic. It is a yaga’s hut after all.

  A face pokes out from behind yellowed lace cutains. The yaga is nothing like the illustrations I have seen in books. She doesn’t have eyes the colour of blood, or iron teeth. She looks almost ordinary.

  ‘Tell your fortune in a match!’ she cries. ‘Two kopecks! Find your fate in the flame!’

  The sled stops and some of the passengers climb out, fumbling in their pockets for coins.

  ‘Look directly ahead,’ says Father in a tight voice. ‘This unfortunate display will soon be over.’

  But this time, I turn to watch. How many chances will I have in my life to see a yaga’s magic?

  The yaga pulls a match out of her box. She doesn’t strike it. She whispers to it instead, in a voice that sounds like the rasping of tinder. And the match lights. Its flame is purple-tinged and it dances from side to side. The yaga bends down and whispers into her customer’s ear.

  I want to know what she sees in the fire. I wonder what she is whispering. But she is too far away for me to hear. I feel obscurely disappointed. The first time I see a yaga and I hardly see her at all.

  The passengers bundle back onto the sled. The whip cracks, and we start to move again.

  Soon the hut will be gone. It will be a relief, I tell myself, when the hut is gone. A relief, and nothing more.

  But the hut scrambles along the ice, trying to keep up with the sled dogs. ‘Tell your fortune in a match!’ cries the yaga. ‘Read your fate in a flame!’

  The hut draws level with the sled. The yaga leans out through the window. Her face is very close to mine. My excitement has seeped away and only fear remains. Why has she chosen me to address? Could she tell what I was thinking? Could she sense that I was curious?

  ‘Tell your fortune in a match,’ she coaxes. I smell her stewed breath and recoil, but she just leans even closer. ‘Don’t you want to find out what the future holds?’ she asks.

  ‘Don’t answer, Olga,’ warns Father. ‘Pretend you can’t hear it.’

  I say nothing.

  ‘You do want to know, don’t you? Tell you what,’ she says, ‘I’ll do you for free.’

  I can feel my heartbeat thick and heavy, pounding through my blood. The yaga is wrong. I don’t want to know, not at all.

  She slides a match from the box. The flame leaps upright, even though we are moving at quite a speed. But the woman with the onion grabs her by the wrist and pulls the yaga’s face close to her own. She whispers something too soft for me to hear, and the yaga spits on the match and it fizzles. Then she draws her head inside the hut. The shutters snap shut, and the hut slinks back into the trees.

  ‘Tawdry tricks,’ mutters the old woman, before returning her attention to her onion.

  Mira leans across the woman to me. ‘Are you all right, Olga?’ she asks. ‘Weren’t you scared?’

  Was I scared? How can I answer? I felt something so much more complicated than simply scared. I wait for my heart to slow to its regular speed before I say, ‘Yes. I was scared. But she’s gone now.’

  ‘She’s gone,’ sniffs Anastasia, ‘but she came awfully close to you. You’ll need to wash as soon as we arrive at the Centre.’

  ‘I don’t think it’s contagious,’ I say.

  ‘You can’t be too careful, Olga,’ says Father.

  The driver calls out the stops as we pass them: ‘Grizhelov!’ and ‘Kibirsk!’ and ‘Roslow!’

  Some of the places are small villages. Others are just signposts in the snow with paths that disappear into the forest. By the time we reach Demidov, which appears to be nothing but a signpost and a tumble-down wooden shelter, only the woman with the onion is left with us in the sled. She collects her paper-wrapped parcels, nods goodbye, and disappears. Her keys jingle as she goes.

  We alight into the snow with our trunks, and the driver cracks his whip one final time and the dogs draw the sled back down the river, out of sight.

  Sunk beneath snowdrifts is an empty wooden shelter. We go inside to wait for Krupnik. It feels like we are the only people left in the world.

  CHAPTER TWO

  The Great Cartographers

  SNOW SWIRLS OUTSIDE the wooden shelter. We sit inside, in the cold. The cracks in the walls have been stuffed with sheepskin and straw to keep the wind out, though they are no match for its knifing gusts. Even in the cramped space, Mira begins to dance. Father and Anastasia watch her adoringly. I ignore her and take Great Names in Tsarish Cartography from my coat pocket.

  I have loved the stories of the Great Cartographers ever since I can remember, though I loved them more before I realised that cartography is not meant for girls, that all the cartographers in the Imperial Society for Cartography are men. When I was young, I read them and dreamed of myself as a cartographer, that one day I might cross the Vkhansky Mountains or circumnavigate the Invisible Lake or even map the Unmappable Blank.

  Now, I read them as wonderful stories that happen to other people. Still, I sometimes take the long way to the Instructionary Institute for Girls just so I can stop at the gates of the Imperial Society for Cartography and wonder about what goes on behind them.

  Here, in the wooden shelter in the snow, I start to read about Krylnikov charting the Arkhipelag Archipelago off the south Tsarish coast, but it feels wrong to read about the sun-baked islands in this bone-twinging cold. I flip to Chapter Fourteen, where Golovnin travels to the Infinite Steppe, but thinking about Golovnin makes me think about the firebird’s egg, which makes me think about the War in the Skies, and here at the edge of the Tsardom the War feels much more real than it did in my history lessons at the Instructionary Institute. I quickly go back to my favourite chapter, Chapter Seventeen: ‘A Tragic Failure: Londonov’s Attempts to Map the Unmappable Blank’. I don’t need to read the book. I have this chapter off by heart:

  In the Great Mapping, every region of Tsaretsvo was charted and added to the official map of the Tsardom. Except for one. The Unmappable Blank: an icy region thought to lie to the north of the Northern Plains. None of the cartographers who had entered the Unmappable Blank had ever returned. There were rumours—wholly unscientific rumours—that it was an enchanted place, where compasses spun wildly and sextants couldn’t find the horizon. And yet, Boris Londonov’s announcement, in the Spring of 1829, that he would mount an expedition to the Blank was greeted with optimism. After all, Londonov was the greatest cartographer of the age. It was Londonov who pinpointed the coordinates of the Invisible Lake, and Londonov who scaled Mount Zenith, the highest peak in the High Stikhlos. It was even said that when Karelin finally completed his journey up the River Dezhdy, he found one of Londonov’s monogrammed handkerchiefs at the river’s source. If anyone could map the Unmappable Blank, it was Londonov…

  ‘Ouch!’ I cry, almost dropping the book.

  Mira’s left boot has connected with the side of my head. ‘Is this really the best place to practise your pirouette?
’ I ask.

  ‘It’s an arabesque,’ says Mira. ‘Not a pirouette. This is a pirouette.’ She tucks one leg up, clasps her hands in front of her and spins.

  I bite down a sigh. I don’t like watching Mira dance. Not because Mira is a bad dancer: she dances like the air is water and she is floating in it. And not because I’m jealous, either, even though I could be very jealous that Mira is graceful and charming and almost certain to become a prima ballerina at the Mariinsky Theatre as soon as she’s old enough, while I am graceless and charmless and entirely not balletic.

  Maybe I am a little jealous. I know I’ll never be good at anything in the way that Mira is good at dancing, and knowing that makes me sad.

  I frown down at my book, only half-watching as Mira spins. She finishes the pirouette by flinging her arms out with a flourish and unleashing a shower of dirty straw from the ceiling.

  I glare at her and spit straw from my mouth.

  ‘Sorry,’ she says in a very unsorry voice. ‘Madame Tansevat says I must practise every day.’ Mira smiles at me, and her smug expression makes me want to kick her sharply in the shins.

  I don’t kick her, of course. I just say, ‘I hardly think Madame Tansevat would want you to practise here.’

  I look to Father for support but he shows no sign he has heard. He is unfolding the telegram from the palace. As soon as he is finished, he refolds it again. Unfolds it. Refolds it. Something about him seems smaller.

  Beside him, Anastasia counts on her fingers. ‘The porcelain dogs,’ she murmurs. ‘The amber binoculars.’ She is listing the contents of our Stolitsa apartment. Everything we couldn’t take with us. ‘The harmonium. Yerzhei, the butler.’

  ‘Sergei, the butler,’ I correct her. Yerzhei was two butlers before Sergei.

  ‘At least I have my mink,’ she says and wraps herself tighter in the white, snowy folds of her prized fur. But even the mink proves small comfort and she continues with her gloomy predictions. ‘They’ll recast The Ghost in the Lantern if I’m not back for rehearsals,’ she says and then she narrows her eyes. ‘Valentina Chershkova will pounce on my part, mark my words. And Olga!’ she clutches Father’s arm. ‘Oh, Aleksei! What if…what if Olga misses her Spring Blossom Ball?’

  The Spring Blossom Ball is the social event of the season. Each spring, on the year of their thirteenth birthdays, the daughters of Stolitsa’s best families are presented at court. And this year is my year. Our last rehearsal was this past Tuesday. It did not go well. Not for me.

  After the Grand Procession, in which the Spring Blossoms make their entrance, and before the dancing (the less said about the dancing the better) comes the Talent. On the night of the ball, each Blossom performs a Talent for the audience. A Talent that shows her to her best advantage. It helps, of course, if she has an advantage to show. At the start of that Tuesday rehearsal, my Talent was fan-waving. Monsieur Palanquin had decided on fan-waving for me because I had been too inelegant for ribbon-twirling, too artless for flower-arranging, and too tuneless to play the Tsarish national anthem on a set of small silver bells. But, as Monsieur Palanquin observed at the Tuesday rehearsal, even standing still and waving a fan was too much for me. After muttering that he had never seen such a feeble flutter, he assigned me epic poetry, which, as everyone knows, is a last-resort kind of Talent. I spent the rest of the rehearsal memorising ‘The Clouds Were Stained with Blood: An Ode to the Memory of the War in the Skies.’

  So, when Anastasia begins to wail about the possibility of my missing the Spring Blossom Ball, I don’t manage to look as remorseful as she expects me to.

  ‘Do you know what I think, Olga?’ she snaps. ‘I think you’re glad to miss the Spring Blossom Ball. We’ve been struck by misfortune—sent to the ends of the Earth—and you’re glad!’

  Mira chooses this moment to do another arabesque and loosen another wad of straw from the ceiling.

  ‘Do you really think I’m glad to be here?’ I ask Anastasia. ‘In the middle of nowhere, with a scalpful of cold straw?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ she shoots back. ‘Are you?’

  I press my lips and stare hard through a crack in the wall. Snow is falling so hard outside that it’s impossible to tell where the white sky stops and the white ground begins. I know I wasn’t glad to be in Stolitsa, where I was expected to dress prettily and behave prettily and spend hours fluttering a fan, while the students at the Instructionary Institute for Boys got to learn Latin and Geometry and Cartography. Especially Cartography. I was at least a little glad to leave the city, where I felt like I never belonged.

  Here, it’s all so different. Different and exciting and terrifying and confusing. Here there are sleds drawn by white fluffy dogs, and there are yagas—real, live yagas. And, I suppose, somewhere in the sky, there are birds.

  Am I glad to be here? I really can’t say. I guess I’m in what Great Names in Tsarish Cartography would describe as uncharted territory.

  CHAPTER THREE

  The Imperial Centre for Avian Observation

  MIRA IS FIRST to see Krupnik. She is peering through one of the cracks in the wall. I press my eye up next to hers and look out. We watch as the blurred speck in the snow slowly takes the shape of a man astride a—

  ‘Did you ever see such an odd horse?’ exclaims Mira. ‘So small. And with such stubby legs!’

  ‘It’s a tarpan,’ I tell her. ‘You only find them in the North. Belugov mapped the Northern Plains from the back of a tarpan.’

  Krupnik trails other tarpans on a rope behind him. We count as—one, two, three, four—they emerge from the blizzard.

  When Krupnik reaches the hut, he dismounts and cries, ‘Oblomov!’ He steps inside and presses Father’s hand. He wears a ragged bearskin coat and a wide grin, and he has a gingery beard that reaches his knees.

  ‘Well,’ says Krupnik and he claps his hands. ‘I’m sure you’re anxious to get to your new home.’

  No one answers him. Undeterred, he trudges outside, lifts our trunks onto the back of one of the tarpans and ties them fast.

  ‘Aleksei’—Anastasia’s nails dig tight into Father’s sleeve—‘you don’t think he means for us to ride those… those…’

  I smile into my coat collar. Anastasia’s biography, From Steppe to Star: The Anastasia Krasnoyarska Story, makes much of the fact that Anastasia was abandoned on the Steppe as a baby and raised by a herd of wild tarpan until the age of fourteen. It’s all nonsense, of course: Studio Kino-Otleechno devises ridiculous romantic backstories for all its stars. Anastasia was no more raised by wild tarpan than Valentina Chershkova sneezes pearls. Not that Anastasia would ever admit it.

  I arrange my face to show a puzzled expression and, all innocence, I say, ‘I thought you would have a special affinity for tarpan. You were raised by a herd of them, after all.’

  ‘Naturally, I do,’ says Anastasia and in an instant her manner changes to strike a note somewhere between haughtiness and calm. She climbs astride the closest tarpan, looking almost as if she knows what she is doing. She and the tarpan toss their manes in unison. I have to hand it to her: she is an excellent actress.

  We start off, into the foothills of the mountains.

  I jolt along in my saddle as the tarpan trots over the rocky terrain. We jolt like this for a very long time. So long my eyes start to stream from the cold and my lashes turn stiff and frosty.

  A ramshackle town, clinging from the side of the slope finally pulls into view and Anastasia lifts her head. ‘Are we here?’ she asks.

  Krupnik answers with a laugh. ‘That’s Pvlov,’ he says. ‘It’s a garrison town—the northernmost town in the whole Tsardom. Tsarina Yekaterina’s XVIII Imperial regiment is stationed there. But it’s not the Centre for Avian Observation.’ He points up to the place where the slope turns treeless and icy. ‘There’s the Centre.’

  He slaps the reins of his tarpan and it snorts. Its warm breath mists in the air.

  We pass Pvlov. The forest thins and the mountain grows bald. At the very to
p of the slope is a curious construction: a wooden house high on stilts. Low clouds swirl around it. ‘There,’ says Krupnik. ‘The Imperial Centre for Avian Observation.’

  Below it, on the slope is an old manor house. It looks like it might have been grand once. Now it is weathered and crumbling. A meagre vegetable garden grows at its front. At the back of the garden, a thin white goat nibbles what stubble it can find between the rocks and ice. A lace curtain in a window twitches as we ride past.

  ‘Your arrival hasn’t passed unmarked,’ says Krupnik.

  ‘I thought there was nothing here but the Centre,’ says Father.

  ‘You’re not quite alone,’ says Krupnik, and he jerks his thumb at the manor house. ‘Those are your neighbours at Tsarina Yekaterina’s Beneficent Home for Retired Ladies in Waiting. You’ll meet them before long, I shouldn’t wonder.’

  The Centre is so high on the steep ridge it can be reached only by a ladder, which wobbles as I climb it. When we arrive, cloud-damp and wind-rumpled, at the top, Krupnik ushers us into a shabby entrance hall. He introduces us to his wife, Larisa Dmitrovna, and then to Colonel Pritnip, head of the Pvlov garrison. Larisa Dmitrovna is a faded-looking woman wearing an afternoon dress. It is trimmed in rich velvet but made in a style that passed from fashion several seasons ago. Anastasia looks with alarm at Larisa Dmitrovna’s dress, taking in its voluminous sleeves and its old-fashioned flouncing. I know she is making the same calculations as I am. Just how long have the Krupniks been here?

  Krupnik proposes that he and Pritnip take Father on a tour of the Centre. Larisa looks reluctant to leave the entrance hall, where all her trunks are stacked and from where she can see the tarpans waiting below to carry her to Demidov. Eventually she invites us to take tea in a cramped room that she describes, optimistically, as the parlour.

  Anastasia, equally optimistic, looks for a maid to bring out the tea trolley, but Larisa fetches the samovar and pours the tea from it herself. Then she settles on a three-legged chair and says, with a watery smile, ‘And these must be your daughters.’