The Secret History of Moscow

17: Alkonost, Sirin, Gamayun

Yakov interrupted. “What happened next?"

Sergey ruffled his feathers. “I would've told you already if you hadn't interrupted me. So just listen, yeah?"

Yakov nodded and kept quiet.

Sergey continued with the tale-how he froze to the floor by the door, unable to turn away or rush forward to help, paralyzed by a mix of terror, revulsion, and pity. How he also grew acutely aware of his own small and fat bird body, and imagined what his wings would look like naked-handless sticks covered in blue puckering skin-how he shuddered.

The dark Byzantine eyes watched him from the wall, drawing him in, and he was unable to look away at the rest of the room, just their eyes and bloody manacles holding the unspeakable, unimaginable abominations.

"Why are you here?” he croaked finally. “What are they doing to you? Why…” He wanted to ask why they were naked, but thought better of it. “What happened to your feathers?"

"They took them,” Sirin said in a halting but sweet voice, and her lips trembled. “They took them to make into charms, to give to evil men."

"They grow back,” Alkonost added, “but they take them again."

"You will die twice,” Gamayun hissed, her eyes burning with insuppressible madness.

"Can I do anything to help?” Sergey whispered. Sadness filled him as no feeling had ever done; he thought that it was the first time in his life that he truly felt something. He wanted nothing more than to help them.

"Take my last feather.” Alkonost shifted awkwardly, turning to expose her flank, naked but for a single small white feather. “It's a charm."

"What does it do?"

"I don't know.” Alkonost bit her lip and almost cried. There was nothing majestic about her now.

"Take mine too,” Sirin said, and twisted, moving her heavy body to the side, exposing the dusty-gray feather in the hollow under her wing. “It's a spell."

"Take them all!” Gamayun struggled against her bonds wildly, drawing blood from her ankles and wrists. “Take my curse, take my hate, take everything we got, but stop this degradation.” When she ceased struggling and hung helpless and exhausted against her manacles, her head on her chest, Sergey saw the black smudge of a feather in the nape of her neck.

He collected the three feathers, and stopped in the doorway. It seemed impossible to leave them like this. “I'll come back for you,” he said. “I promise."

The three bird-women said nothing; Alkonost started with her song again, a childish lullaby Sergey had heard too many years ago to remember the words of, but the melody stirred his heart with an unfamiliar longing for the happy time without responsibility, for the time when he could be tucked under the thick quilted blanket and no worry could touch him there. He swallowed the bile rising in his throat and squeezed through the slit in the door. He felt lighter somehow, emptier.

He moved his wings, trying to explain. “It's like this, see,” he said. “Nothing will ever be the same again. It's like my life broke in half. Do you know what I mean?"

Yakov nodded. He did. He knew the distinct before and after, he felt the rift that cleaved his life in two separate and irreconcilable parts, where he felt that one had nothing to do with the other; he was a different man now, and he felt like throwing himself on the cold floor of his prison and weeping and striking his fists against the boards when he thought that this rift, this separator, this memory had been pried out of his soul by the bony spirit fingers of the boatman.

"Where are the feathers?” Galina asked.

Sergey smirked and lifted his wings. There, among his own dirty-white feathers, there was a brilliantly white one, a gray one, and a black one, their shafts entangled securely in his down.

Yakov picked them out, his stubby fingers particularly ungraceful, and studied the feathers. “What do we do with them?"

"A charm, a spell and a curse,” Galina said.

Yakov sighed and closed his fist. “What does it even mean? Everyone here speaks in stupid riddles, like if throwing words together would somehow give them meaning. Well, it doesn't; it's all gibberish to me. So don't you start talking like that, like you know what's going on."

"Don't tell me what to do and how to talk.” Galina almost snarled at him. “Who do you think you are? I'm not your wife, so you don't snap at me every time something goes wrong."

He shrugged and handed her the feathers. “You figure this one out then."

Galina studied the feathers on her palm, tilting it sideways to catch the light from the window in the end of the hallway. She looked as perplexed as Yakov felt, and he had to suppress a smirk of satisfaction. “A charm or a spell?” Galina mused. “And do any of you remember any fairytales with feathers?"

"Just with flower petals,” Sergey said. “Remember the one about the seven-colored flower?"

Galina grinned. “Sure do. ‘Fly little petal from east to west, from north to south, and come back around, make my wish come true when you touch the ground.’”

"That's the one,” Sergey squawked, pleased. “Think it'll work?"

"Not the chant,” Galina answered, “But let's see what happens when they touch the ground.” She loosened her fingers, and all three of them watched as the feathers drifted down to the floor and came to rest, the fine silken fibers wavering in the gentle draft coming from the window at the end of the hallway.

They waited a while; the feathers remained motionless.

"Screw this,” Yakov said. “Let's get out of here, find Koschey, and see if he knows what that's all about."

"We can't leave,” Galina said, and pointed at the door. As if he were stupid.

"Sergey,” Yakov said. “Can you get to the lock?"

"Hold on,” the rook said, and waddled outside through the slot in the bottom of the door. They heard it scraping and panting; an occasional thud signified a fall.

"I can't reach it,” Sergey informed them, poking his head through the opening. “If you could give me a boost-but even then I don't know if I'm strong enough."

"I am,” Yakov said, and lay down on the floor. He squeezed his arm through the opening and waited for the rook to step on his open hand. Once the clawed cold bird fingers wound around his thumb, he turned on his right side, bending his arm upward.

"Just a bit more,” Sergey instructed. “There. I'm touching it with my beak.” There was more scraping and clanging of metal. “Can't do it-the lock's too strong."

"Put your beak next to the tumbler,” Yakov said. “Does it go right or left?"

"Left,” Sergey said. “Just be careful."

Yakov grasped the bird's legs and put all the strength of his arm into forcing the internal tumbler aside. He worked blind, and his heavy breathing was the only sound in the cell. Sergey was a trooper-Yakov could feel how stiff the rook was, how hard he tried to remain motionless and rigid.

A sharp crack startled Yakov-at first, he thought that Sergey's beak had broken. Galina jumped to the door and pushed it outward, and it gave. Yakov released the bird, picked up the magic feathers, and jumped to his feet. “Are you all right?” he asked Sergey.

"Fine,” he answered from the outside. “Just a little sore. Come on, I'll show you the way."

Yakov was not fond of violence; he approached it as something one needed to be stoic about, never deriving either pleasure or distaste from it. He tried to maintain the same perspective once they rounded the corner and encountered one of the Napoleonic soldiers; this one was French. He looked at Yakov with very round, very pale eyes, and his mouth mimicked their round shape. He reached for his musket, but Yakov knocked him to the ground with a single economical punch before he could level his piece.

"What should we do with him?” Galina said, looking at the soldier with a worried, almost pitying expression. “We are not going to just leave him here, are we?"

Yakov shrugged. “What else can we do? I'm not carrying him.” He stared at the soldier's waxen face, his concave closed eyelids shot through with a multitude of veins, fine like cracks on a porcelain cup. “He'll be all right.” In truth, the soldier didn't look like he would be all right-none of them did. They all looked deader than dead, and that didn't sit well with him. Everyone else was alive in here-or at least they seemed to think so. What if they weren't, though? What if he were dead too?

Yakov shook his head and smiled, and followed the rook, which danced and hopped impatiently, down the wooden hall. He wasn't dead; this wasn't some stupid story they used to tell as kids by the campfire, during the blue and endless nights at the summer camp. He still remembered them-stupidities and non-sequiturs, man-eating furniture and menacing but unforgivably dumb serial killers. And dead people who didn't know they were dead until someone told then that they were, and then they crumbled into dust. Even as an adult he remembered the chilled shivers that crawled down his collar then, induced not so much by the stories themselves but by the darkness and the overall mood of joyful conspiracy, the conspiracy of being voluntarily scared, of faking the emotion until it became true.

"Here.” Sergey stopped in front of a door, and Yakov looked back, dismayed to realize that they hadn't traveled far, just turned the corner and gone a bit down the corridor that seemed to run around the entire perimeter of the palace.

"You knew they were here the whole time?” Galina asked. “Why didn't you give the feathers to them?"

Sergey puffed out his bird chest. “'Cause. You're people, you're my folk. These fairytale things-not so much."

"You're a fairytale thing,” Galina said. “You're a talking bird."

"Regular birds can talk too,” Sergey said. “Besides, I'm not really a bird."

"Your feathers beg to differ,” Yakov said. “Come on, get in there."

The slot on this door was located higher than on the one that imprisoned them previously. Yakov picked Sergey up and unceremoniously shoved him inside; he looked through the slot, but could see only darkness and dilute shimmer. A weak scent of grass and milk told him that Zemun was indeed in there.

"Look,” Koschey's crackling voice said, “it's that reanimated corpse from the surface."

"Don't call him that,” said Zemun. “Don't you think one might not want to be reminded of one's mortality?"

"I wouldn't know anything about that,” Koschey said with an audible sneer. “What do you bring us, rook?"

"Feathers,” Yakov said, pressing his lips to the slot in the door. “From Alkonost and company. Do you know what to do with them?"

There was some gasping and whispering inside.

Yakov sighed and fiddled with the lock-a simple thing, easily overcome with any narrow tool. “Do you have any pins on you?” he asked Galina.

She dug through the pockets of her jeans-the same ones she'd been wearing when they first came here; Yakov realized that his own clothes were also filthy, and wondered why it bothered him so little.

"Here.” Galina offered a slender bobby pin on the open palm of her right hand.

He studied it a while, a thin black piece of metal nestled into the deep furrow of her life line. It seemed so out of context here, it didn't belong. They were in a wooden corridor in some medieval palace, with nothing but pale unearthly light for company; they were underground, in a place that was below the river and the subways and secret KGB bunkers, the place that was so far below as to not exist, for all reasonable purposes. Bobby pins did not belong. Still, he jammed it into the lock, shifting the tumblers inside-easier this time, since he didn't have to work blind. He stuck out his tongue, self-consciously, because he remembered since childhood that it helped. Breathing heavily, tongue out, he concentrated on his work until the tumblers shifted and Galina tapped his shoulder.

"What?” His voice came out more irritable than he meant.

"Look,” she whispered.

He did. More soldiers, of course, and one of them carried a child on its shoulders-a horrible malformed child that grasped the soldier's neck with its claw-like hands, its heels cruelly digging into the man's sides, bunching his uniform. Yakov recognized him for the legendary Zlyden. The group exuded the smell of old ash and sour milk, and Yakov never wished for anything more than to be away from them.

The horrible child whined, kicking the soldiers and urging them on. It flailed and bit the ear of his visibly annoyed mount.

Yakov felt something shift inside his soul at the sound of the child's crying. Why wouldn't it stop, why wouldn't it just shut up and be quiet, why did it have to mete out the dull torment of its sniffling and sobbing, fits and starts, deceptive and momentary silences that were quickly displaced by resumed crying? And the only thing that was stopping him from crying out now-Shut up, shut up, or I'll-was a sudden unexplained fear that the voice would fall silent in compliance with his unsaid wishes, and…?

"Do something,” Galina hissed into his ear before he could complete the terrible thought, and the threads fell apart again, like the pieces in a kaleidoscope, nothing but trash, ghastly bits of the soul-crushing toy he would never buy for a child.

A strong shove from behind sent him sprawling under the soldiers’ feet-the door he had forgotten about hit him in the back as it swung open, and Koschey and Timur-Bey stood in the doorway, ready to quarrel.

Yakov curled up, covering his head with his hands, expecting a blow. Instead, the soldiers rushed past him, and the only kick he received was accidental. He rose to his feet, just in time to witness Timur-Bey reaching into his wide sleeve and pulling out a long shining blade.

Koschey stood next to him, exceptionally tall and thin and straight, with a grey feather held in his bony fingers. His hollow cheeks puffed out in a mockery of a breath; he blew on the feather, all the while drawing symbols in the air with his left hand.

Yakov had no sense of what was happening; he only knew enough to rush past the soldiers (he tried not to look at Zlyden), to grab Galina's elbow and drag her away. He wanted to cover her wide eyes with his palm, to spare her the sight of the wide flashing arc of Timur-Bey's saber, the dull glint of the bayonets, and the dark swirling of the air where Koschey agitated it with his hand.

He pulled her to the wall by the now open cell door, pressing flat against the wooden planks that still-all these centuries-retained a faint smell of cedar and pine, a frail and resinous scent. “Don't look,” he whispered.

She looked, and why wouldn't she? She was a grown-up, not the imaginary child Yakov was-had been-protecting, in his muddled imagination; she didn't need to turn away when the bayonets and sabers stabbed and slashed, leaving the febrile blooms of red carnations in their wake; she was perfectly capable of watching the air thicken into a gray cloud, Sirin's spell rumbling inside it with brief lightning flashes, charging the air with the smell of ozone, heating the wall under their backs and making it breathe forth an exhalation of resin and summer and wild strawberries.

The cloud surrounded the soldier who carried Zlyden and grew solid-it seemed a porous resin, a roughly hewn chunk of cement. As it solidified, the rest of the soldiers, many of them bleeding, stepped away from it, confused. There was no sign of Likho, and Yakov sensed that without their guardians the soldiers were timid.

Yakov stepped forward, holding up his palm to the fray. To his surprise, even Timur-Bey stepped back and wiped his saber on his sleeve. “Citizens,” he said to the soldiers, “you're under arrest for disturbing the peace. Please surrender your weapons."

"No,” one of the soldiers said. “Why should we listen to you?” His gaze traveled to one of his comrades bleeding on the ground, his blood, surprisingly real, soaking into the green wool of his uniform, staining it black.

How many times could the dead die? Yakov thought. A lot, the answer came to him. The dead always die, every time the living think of them dying, like the child crying in the crib who fell silent and resumed again-he died over and over, killed by the mere thought, only to come back to life and cry and die again. Just like the soldier of the long-ago war who kept falling, in slow motion, under the bayonet, under the bullet, under the blade of a saber; the soldier who slipped in his own blood and fell among the red carnations, again and again. He only lay still when one pinned him with a gaze.

Galina gently nudged him aside. “You should listen to him,” she said, “because Zlyden and Likho are not here to be listened to. You traded your luck away, and ours. I'm just looking for my sister and I don't know if I can find her without any luck, and if you won't help then at least let us go."

"Or you'll end up like him,” Koschey said and pointed at the grey blob half-blocking the corridor.

The soldier opened his mouth to answer but his chest exploded in a loud blast-not carnations but a cavernous red mouth opened in his chest, fringed with white rib fragments like hungry teeth. A slow wet hiss came from between his suddenly white lips, bubbling forth with pink foam. His knees buckled and he fell forward, folding on his way like a lounge chair.

At first, Yakov thought that Koschey's magic had done it to the soldier; but Koschey's face expressed as much surprise and shock as Galina's. Even Zemun and Sergey edged out of the cell where they were wisely waiting out the altercation, looking for the source of the blast and the deafening silence that followed.

A careful scattering of footfalls came from behind the grey boulder that was blocking most of the view; military boots, Yakov guessed. He gripped Galina's elbow; Koschey's hands knotted into fists, and Timur-Bey reached for his saber. The confrontation forgotten, the Napoleonic soldiers turned to face the unknown danger, their shoulders brushing against Timur-Bey's sleeves and Koschey's outstretched hands, their backs turned on Yakov as if he was no longer a threat but an ally.

"Don't anyone move,” a female voice said, and the muzzle of a shotgun peeked from behind the gray boulder. “What on earth is that thing, anyway?"

Galina shook off Yakov's hand, and rushed forward, pushing between the soldiers. “Elena!” she called out. “Is that you?"

The Decembrist's wife stepped into view, her black velvet dress stained with river mud, and the fingernails of her small white hands marked with half-moons of dirt. She dropped the shotgun she was holding to her chest on the floor and extended her arms to Galina. The two women hugged and laughed, oblivious to the blood on the floor.

Elena had not come alone-from behind the gray boulder of Sirin's spell, several rusalki shod in heavy military boots filed out, followed by two soldiers circa 1917 or so-Yakov pegged them for Budyonny's cavalrymen, Cossacks or outlaws (not that there was much of a difference) all. Revolutionary and war heroes, led by the class enemy and several drowned girls. Yakov decided not to contemplate further.

"Why did you shoot him?” he asked Elena.

She shot him an irritated look-clearly, she wanted nothing better than to gab with Galina. “They're traitors,” she said.

"That is not true!” one of the surviving soldiers protested.

"Of course it is, Poruchik,” Elena said. “Burned during the retreat, imagine that! You're forgetting that my husband was leading your regiment. I know why you stayed behind; I know why you burned-the city couldn't stand your presence, the deserters. It would rather lose a building than let you remain inside it. You've abandoned your commander."

The poruchik straightened, his white eyes almost glowing with anger. “You should talk, you bitch. You were the one who betrayed him, you didn't do as a good wife was supposed to-you were meant to go to Siberia with him, so you too deserve to be here in the blasted underground, you too…"

He didn't finish-Elena picked up the shotgun in a fluid motion and leveled it on his chest. Yakov took it for bravado, just like everyone else-the soldiers on Elena's side smirked, the ones opposing her murmured discontent. A shotgun blast came unanticipated.

"What are you doing?” Yakov yelled as the poruchik fell into the arms of his comrades, thrown back by the force of the blast. “Have you lost your mind? He wasn't doing anything!"

Elena shrugged and rested the shotgun on her naked shoulder. “It wasn't a self-defense killing, Yakov,” she said. “It was a revenge killing. They killed Berendey and they cost my husband his health and his soul-he was a broken man after that war; Siberia couldn't do worse than they."

"They also fed Likho and Zlyden,” Zemun interjected.

"You can't just go killing people!” Yakov said.

"Sure she can,” Timur-Bey said. He was so quiet until then, Yakov forgot that he was even there. “We have no cops here. And we do not like traitors."

"I hate to interrupt the spirited debate on the nature of justice,” Koschey said. “But I think that perhaps we should take care of Alkonost and her sisters, and worry about these fried fleshbags later."

The three remaining soldiers obediently went into the cell vacated by Zemun and the rook; the lock was busted, and two stoic-looking cavalrymen stayed behind to guard them.

"Wait,” Galina said. “What about my sister? What about the rest of the people turned into birds?"

Koschey twirled the white feather in his fingers. “I can help them, but we need to get them to the surface first. I don't want all these tourists stuck here."

"Isn't this place supposed to be connected to Kolomenskoe?” Yakov said.

"Yes,” Sergey squawked. “Slava always met them there, and there has to be some connection. And I think the tower in the east, that's where the exit is. The birds are in the western one."

"We'll check everything,” Elena said, and motioned for her small but intimidating army to follow. “Your other friend is on the surface, and if Father Frost hasn't imagined things in a drunken stupor, he and his girlfriend were planning to visit Kolomenskoe. Come on, let's get Gamayun and the rest, find the exit and round up the birds."

"And find One-Eyed Likho,” Galina added. “Funny you didn't run into it-him."

Elena nodded, smiling. “That's a lot of things to do,” she said. “Let's get a move on."