Rosa and the Veil of Gold (20 page)

“Not this one,” he says.

Her family gather around her as she weeps. The bear knows she is weeping with relief.

And on down the line. “Not this one.” “Not that one.” “Not her.”

Until finally Stasya steps before Ivan. She is unsure what she should do. A number of the other girls have smiled at him, or asked after his health. She remains silent and stone-faced as she ponders on the correct way to address him.

“Your majesty,” his aide says to him, “this is Stasya, daughter of Roman Yurievich Zakharin.”

Stasya meets his eye. She parts her lips to greet him, then sees the sudden transformation of his expression: love and desire have seized him. “It is all my joy to meet you, Stasya Romanovna,” he says.

Stasya feels something inside her shift. She is falling, she has lost control of her fate. She holds on to her breath, as though it may be the last one breathed as a free woman.

“Have you anything you would like to say to me, child?” Ivan says.

Stasya wants to shout at this boy, “I am not a child.” She does not. Instead, she says, “How long do you think you will live, Ivan Vasilevich?”

Ivan blinks slowly, then a smile comes to his face. “I shall live at least another fifty years, maybe sixty.”

“I have sixty years to spare you, then,” she says, “if you’d care to marry me.”

A murmur runs about the room, a number of the boyars are frowning their disapproval. Ivan turns to his aide and nods decisively.

“This one,” he says.

On her wedding night, Stasya takes the Golden Bear into the cavernous royal bedchamber as a reminder of the world she has left behind. From among the cushions and furs of the canopied bed it gives her comfort to gaze upon the oddly-decorated creature, and the bear feels the pleasure of being loved for the first time in many centuries.

The bear sits atop an ivory casket and watches as time passes, as Stasya’s belly grows and expels a human child, a little girl named Anna. Of course, Stasya has borne many children before. Most of the witches and wizards of Skazki grew in her womb and came screeching from her body on windy nights. They suckled roughly at her breasts for one evening then, grown to full size, ran from her cottage into the wide dawn to make their mischief. Stasya felt nothing for any of those creatures, and expects to feel nothing for the human spawn. In fact, she expects to feel revulsion. It is only natural to fear difference in such a way.

Surrounded by silent nurses and bloodied sheets, Stasya holds the little child in her arms. It is pink and helpless, with Ivan’s heavy brow and Stasya’s long fingers. Stasya counts the fingers, each tiny digit as soft and light as moonbeams. She is overwhelmed by feelings of vulnerability, as though the child’s helplessness is contagious. In an instant, Stasya falls in love with her daughter, and this act, this terrifying weakness, changes something in her fibres and sinews. The bear can sense it. Stasya is becoming human.

What woe, what grief and horror, when the child dies before its first birthday. And then another, Maria, only a year later. And then a third, Dmetri, dropped by a careless nurse into the river. The constant cycle of elation and grief wears Stasya like rapid water wears a stone. She becomes smaller and harder, she loses her texture.

Ivan loves Stasya dearly, and thinks more children will cure her melancholy. “We have lost three,” he says, “but perhaps the next three will live long and be happy. We must try again.”

So her belly swells for a fourth time, but now the boyars talk in whispers about Stasya. They suspect she is a witch.

“She poisons her children through witchcraft.”

“My wife says she spoiled and tangled the wool when she came visiting.”

“She has an unearthly gleam in her eye.”

“The Metropolitan says she shows no interest in prayers.”

“She hangs nettles in her bedchamber.”

“Ravens gather at her window.”

So it goes on, until opinion of her is tainted like good soup with bad meat. She confines herself for the entire pregnancy in the
bedchamber. Long shadows in the dusty sunshine are all the sights to see from her bed, where she sleeps and waits and waits and sleeps. Her sleep is often punctuated with awful dreams of dead babies: sometimes the infants are pink and slick with birth blood, but deafeningly silent; sometimes they are pale and blue and cold, dusted with the soil of the grave; sometimes it is simply a dream of a heartbeat fading to awful stillness, and she wakes with a start and pounds her own heart to make sure it still beats. The life inside her stretches and kicks blithely. There are no guarantees for this child, there is no comfort for Stasya in numerical probabilities. It may die, just like the others. She cannot endure not knowing its fate.

Although the rumours of magic endanger her, she turns to that forbidden craft in her moment of desperate uncertainty.

Stasya leaves the Kremlin as the sun rises on the melting snow. It has been a mild winter, and the markets are opening early for spring. She ignores the stares of those she passes, who are amazed to see the Tsar’s pregnant wife trudging over the uneven ground in a brocade housecoat and furs, her long ash hair unbound. Down the hill and towards the river, the market becomes a melange of animal smells and noises. Peasants shudder in the cold and children curl in balls next to green fires while their mothers wash clothes on the river’s edge. At the end of a long row of miserable goods proffered by miserable folk, eight miserable sheep in a pen bleat their wretchedness to the dawn cold.

“My child,” she whispers, crossing her right hand over her belly, “which one of these beasts will tell me what will happen to you?”

“Are you going to buy one or not?” a grubby man in layers of brown rags asks her.

She turns to admonish him for speaking so to the Tsaritsa, then holds her tongue. A shivering child clings to his side, a girl of about eight with a thin, haunted expression. Neither this girl nor her ill-tempered father know who Stasya is. All noblewomen look the same to them: well-dressed, well-fed and warm. Other distinguishing features—eyes, lips or hair—are incidental.

“That one,” she says, indicating a ram at the back of the pen. “I’ll pay a good price for him.” The child gasps as Stasya produces a handful of silver coins to pour into his palm.

Through the shivering dawn streets, Stasya leads the sheep back to the Terem Palace. Whispers follow her.
Why is such a noblewoman out buying a dirty sheep? Isn’t that the Tsaritsa? I’ve heard she practises the old ways. This confirms it, for why would the Tsaritsa select her own sheep unless it is for augury? Augury with a ram’s shoulder! Then she is as ungodly as rumour tells.

Augury is a language learned in Stasya’s infancy, embodied in her muscles and bones like ancient memory. She clears all the servants out of the hollow kitchen and secures the doors. It has been a long time now since she performed any magic, and many things have changed. She fears that the woman she once was—Mokosha, the goddess—is buried so deep in human suffering that she will never again be free. But the magic warms her fingers and expands up into her muscles, supple and strong as ever. She kills the ram and hacks bloody shoulders from its body, throws them on the hot coals and waits for the meat to soften and lift. Stasya’s hands are covered in blood, her fine shoes are sticky with it. She crouches at the stove like a vulgar witch and pokes at the hunk of meat. It falls away, exposing the white bone. Stasya peers at the bone, looking for marks and notches. The charred meat smells bitter, mingling with the metallic stink of the blood on the floor. She focuses her eyes, hot and dry from the fire, and opens up that second sight with which she was infused in the moment she sprang from Mother Moist Earth.

On the ram’s shoulder a long notch and a smaller beside it. Ivan and the child: a boy. She is not in the scene. Ivan holds something above his head—a staff? With the iron poker, she turns the other bone. Here, the next scene. The child lies upon the ground, his father crouched over him in a position of grief.

Dead, then? Killed by his own father?

“By all the stars, no!” Stasya sits on the floor and weeps helpless tears. The child inside her is already doomed. Blood seeps into her skirts, and a hesitant knock brings her back to reality. Stasya touches her belly and knows this tide of feeling has swept her away, too far. She grows more human every day, and with that, more mortal. She climbs to her feet and unbolts the heavy wooden door. Outside in the gloomy corridor, four servants wait for her.

Stasya gestures with bloody hands towards the ram’s carcass. “Use every part,” she says. “The skin for a coat, the entrails for the table, the breast for soup. Stuff the kidneys, roast the ribs, boil the feet, and fry the liver with onion. Leave nothing for any to find.”

One of the servants shrinks away from her. Another, her Church faith making her too bold, says, “And the shoulders, lady? Shall we stuff them with eggs?”

Stasya drills her index finger into the woman’s collarbone and mutters, “You shall not tell a soul.” With an icy stare which she hopes will frighten them into silence, Stasya leaves and winds up the dark, narrow stairs to wash away the blood.

The Secret Ambassador visits from time to time. Ivan is mistrustful of him, knowing by now where he is from. Although Ivan thinks the godless folk belong in godless country and not here at court, he loves his wife and knows that the Secret Ambassador cheers her bouts of melancholy. Over the years, Stasya confesses to the Secret Ambassador all her concerns. The Secret Ambassador listens, nods and hums in sympathy, but is unmoved. She must stay in Mir, she must keep bearing children.

And so she does, with a lump of lead in her heart. Stasya’s fourth child, little Ivan, is doomed to be killed by his father. Her sixth child, Fedor, is half-witted. But the one between them, her only living daughter, Evdoxia, brings her great joy. She is healthy and bonny, and Stasya finds a measure of peace at last in her company. Long days are spent in the royal bedchamber, learning to read and write, singing songs, lining up the poppets as soldiers, or children or women at plough. Sometimes the four of them spill out into the palace for long hiding games, or to hear their voices echoing between the vast stone walls and up the narrow stairs. Always, always, Stasya is aware she must have more.

She miscarries and miscarries and miscarries again, and it becomes clear that these three children are the only ones left. Ivan is not concerned: he has two male heirs, even if the youngest is simple. Ivan does not listen to Stasya’s warnings about little Ivan’s death at his hands. He laughs and says, “What nonsense! As if I would lift my hand against my own son.”

The Secret Ambassador is less confident.

“If you have seen the future, and little Ivan doesn’t survive to become Tsar, then we have to rely on Fedor who is a fool and cannot govern.”

“What about Evdoxia?” Stasya says. “She would be clever and fair.”

“She is a girl. The Russian people aren’t yet ready to see a woman rule them in her own right. No, you must have another.”

Stasya is weary at the thought, too weary to pace the fifty feet of the bedchamber. She sits heavily. Her joints ache and she is troubled by constant stomach pains.

All of this from agreeing to spend sixty short years in Mir. Had she known what bearing human children would do to her, she would have refused the Secret Ambassador’s request: that visit seems so long ago it may have belonged to someone else’s life. “I cannot have another child. My womb won’t quicken. I believe I am ill and I fear that I may die.”

“You cannot die. You are a god.”

“How certain of that are you?” she asks, standing and leaning against a pillar of the bed. A breeze creeps through the window, setting the tapestries dancing. “I suffer illness and pain. I grieve for all my dead babies…” She swallows a sob. “I am not invincible, Secret Ambassador. Another child would kill me. My husband no longer takes his pleasure with me for fear of it.”

The Secret Ambassador shakes his head irritably. “Mokosha,” he says, calling her by her old name, “you are formed for fertility, for childbirth, for bearing fruit endlessly. I cannot believe what I hear.”

“Then believe what you see, Koschey,” she snaps, turning her tired face up to him. “I have aged. I lose my beauty. Are these not signs enough that I am not now what I once was?”

The bear feels a twinge of sadness, knowing that Stasya is right. She will pass on, as every other man, woman and child.

Unmoved, however, the Secret Ambassador takes his leave. He is determined. There is one thing he knows about Mir society: if a wife won’t comply, a husband may be appealed to.

Ivan is a roamer, often throwing on a workman’s cloak and disappearing into anonymous crowds away from the affairs of state. The Secret Ambassador suspects where he may find the Tsar
today. A grand cathedral is being built across the square in celebration of his victory over the Tatars. Ivan is obsessed with it, and interferes with the painters and masons and architects until they despair of finishing anything unimpeded. The Secret Ambassador ducks under the low thresholds and arches, scanning the faces of the workmen who bustle in and out of shadow, in and out of hearing. Eventually, he finds Ivan standing at the bottom of a twisted staircase gazing at a half-finished fresco of saints. Around it, a byzantine floral pattern is painted on a white background. The smells of paint and earth are strong, and Ivan’s cloak is musty.

“Ivan,” says the Secret Ambassador.

Ivan turns. The angle of his neck has grown more pronounced with age, giving him a hunched, expectant look. “I should cut your throat for not addressing me as your Great Lord, Tsar and Grand Duke.”

“I am not of your world. I am not your subject.”

Ivan laughs. “My wife tells me you cannot die anyway. That you store your soul outside your body and make yourself invincible.” Ivan’s eyes are already returning to the fresco.

“Do you believe your wife?”

“She’s probably full of lies, most women are. But I don’t care what you are, for I am blessed by God and I know you cannot harm me.” His voice drops to a malevolent whisper. “Those who are afraid of witches are always those who fear that God will forsake them.”