Once, seven experienced its light but usually it was far less. It would take thousands of years, tens of thousands of years perhaps, to reach all human beings with the light.
Baba Iaga came home one evening — so tired — and she gathered her little family around her, the pelican child and the dog and the cat and said, My dear ones, I still have magic and power unrealized. Do you wish to become human beings, for some think you are under a hellish spell. Do you want to become human? The cat and the dog spoke. The pelican child had not spoken since the day of her return.
No, the dog and the cat said.
When I was doing some research for a book on the Florida Keys some twenty years ago, I discovered that John James Audubon, despite his revered status, was a great slaughterer of birds. (Perhaps everyone was aware of this.) He killed tirelessly for pleasurable sport and would wipe out entire mangrove islands of its inhabitants because. well, because I guess it was easy once he got started. I do hope the curse of history will catch up with him. Perhaps Baba Iaga will be the great facilitator in that regard.
Some linguists posit that the baba component of her name derives from pelican. And the pelican is one of the great birds of legend. Returning to her nest to find her infants dead, she pierces her own breast and revives them with her blood.
Baba Iaga is the most marvelous creature in all of Russian folklore and totally unpredictable in her behavior. In this story, she becomes kind and sorrowful, even, perhaps, tragic.
JONATHON KEATS. Ardour
YOU MEET FOLKS WHO REMEMBER WHEN THIS COUNTRY STILL HAD A winter, and one year led into another unhindered. Come the first snow, men would leave the fields for fallow, to chop firewood in the forest. Then not more than a day would go by before you’d hear that one of them had seen her.
She wasn’t somebody any of them knew, at least not personally, by way of an affair or a mutual acquaintance. But long before, they’d made up a name to use when talking to one another, as men will, about a girl. They called her Ardour.
The story was ever the same. Resting alone in a clearing, burning a small flame for warmth, a peasant would sense at first just a breath within the dead trees’ shadows. Then he’d see the sky-gray of two eyes, watching. That was what she was always doing, the girl they called Ardour, and, calling out to her, they’d each compete to draw her closer than any of the others had done. Yet there was a certain distance that she’d always keep.
It was not, evidently, a matter of modesty: Over her bare skin she wore at most a coat of snow, often only a gloss of frost. Nor could she seriously be considered a flirt: Unlike young women in town who hid their flaws by making potential suitors notice only each other’s faults, Ardour had no perceptible imperfection. From behind their fire, they’d call to her, and it was as if she simply wasn’t sure how to respond.
Could she have known their ulterior motives? Each year echoed the one before. As she woke into the first snow, she recalled not what had happened the previous winter, but remembered only an urge that had yet gone unfulfilled.
It had begun as something she’d seen, who knew when, deep in the woods where she’d lived all eternity: A girl like her — breasts as steep as snow peaks beneath a blizzard of hair — came hand-in-hand with a man into an open meadow, where they embraced, and, it seemed, drew into a single skin. Then there were his words, her tears. A rupture, a quiver. They cradled, as if each were the other’s wound.
Had Ardour known the word, perhaps she’d have called it love. As likely, had she known hate, that term would have occurred to her as she watched the couple wrangle. She hadn’t had language to guide her. So she’d clutched her own numb flesh, and dreamed what it would be to—
To feel? To desire? How? Who can be lonely, even, if never not alone? After that, each year, under cover of winter, she hovered on the verge of humanity. And men urged her over the threshold.
They beseeched her all season long until at last she came too close to fire. As the frost thawed from her, she melted with it, into clear water. Then the cold brace of winter would follow her, flowing down-river through closed forest into the unknown. Beneath the snow would emerge a new spring. Work would begin again, the cycle of sowing and reaping that consumed everybody most of the year. There was so much to be done, to bring bread to the table. The only able peasant permitted by the king to remain idle was the man who had tempted Ardour from her forest cover. That was the reward for ending winter.
Every year men worked harder to lure Ardour to her fate. They sang to her, played the fiddle or the flute. If once they’d been attracted to her, after a while you no longer heard them at the tavern talking lustily about her blizzard of hair, those breasts as steep as snow peaks. Each man thought only of himself.
Yet, the more trouble they took, the less their efforts worked to draw her near. The king watched as his subjects flattered and bribed Ardour, tended to her more unctuously than to his majesty. The winter, previously a period of rest, was more trying than a season of sowing, and what did it reap? For all but the man who ushered Ardour’s departure, another nine months of labor.
The wintertime clamor became almost intolerable, each man playing whatever instrument he knew, dancing, tendering bread, mead, gold. Ardour could scarcely choose which way to look, let alone who to let tempt her. One year she was drawn to the peasant who had the loudest horn, which she mistook — simple soul — for the force of his desire. Another winter, she went for the one who danced most gracefully, which she misunderstood — foolish girl — as a measure of his sensitivity. And then came the season that she fell for the man with the greatest goods, which she misinterpreted — dumb broad — as a token of his generosity.
After that, she entirely forgot what she’d wished once to find amongst men. She came back with winter, her annual ritual, and stormed around in search of bigger, better — what? No longer was she shy. She smothered fires, buried farmers under her coats of snow. The people called her cruel — no more dumb fool simple soul — and wondered how she’d come to resemble them.
Winter that year stretched into April, May, June, July. By August they were burning the days of their calendars for warmth. The king ordained that whoever brought about her fall would never work again. But the men who’d once fought so hard to woo her now just begged her to be gone. Horns and flutes abandoned, their voices became one: Curse Ardour! Go away! Leave! Scram!
September, October, November. Winter led into winter. The king’s hunters laid traps to catch her. They shot to kill, sunk their munitions into snow. December, January, February, March. Months lost their meanings, years their numbering. Words were moot. Time was marked only by the aching advance of starvation. Folk looked forward to dying.
At last the king had only his son to send from his castle for firewood to warm his gruel. The boy had been quite young when that interminable winter began, and had heard of Ardour only as a monster, insatiable in her appetite for human life. He knew well to fear her, a beast as immense as his country, her body encompassing mountains and valleys, a woman said to freeze men with her breath. His father didn’t have to tell him to take care.
He wore boots of cowhide lined in fur, laced up to his thighs, triple-tied. His hat and gloves had been crafted from the same, fit to him so tight that there wasn’t even the space for a shiver. The coat, though, was a nobler matter: It had been willed to the king by his father, to whom it had been given by his father’s father — a tradition, in short, that went back to a generation before there was gold to leaf the family tree. What the coat was made of, though, people no longer knew: the skin of an extinct animal — a dragon, perhaps — or even the earth’s own crust? That day, the king laid it on his son.
With ax and saw, the boy made his way into the woods. And it might have been the first time in his sixteen years that he was alone, were there not, he wondered, another set of eyes fixed on his own. They were, at a glance, an overcast gray, but cleared, as he stared, to two open pupils. They belonged to a girl such as he’d never seen before. The snow covered her small body completely, her hair wrapped in the fierce weather that ravaged every inch of bare flesh.
He was not, in truth, especially brave. But had he been moved to rescue the girl from winter, to bring her to
