Baba Yaga's Daughter and Other Stories of the Old Races Read online

  Baba Yaga’s

  Daughter

  & Other Tales of the Old Races

  C. E. Murphy

  Subterranean Press 2012

  Baba Yaga’s Daughter

  and Other Tales of the Old Races

  Copyright © 2012 by C. E. Murphy. All rights reserved.

  Dust jacket illustration Copyright © 2012 by Tom Canty. All rights reserved.

  Print version interior design Copyright © 2012

  by Desert Isle Design, LLC. All rights reserved.

  Electronic Edition

  ISBN

  978-1-59606-570-3

  Subterranean Press

  PO Box 190106

  Burton, MI 48519

  www.subterraneanpress.com

  Table of Contents

  From Russia, with Love

  Five Card Draw

  Hot Time in the Old Town Tonight

  When in Rome

  Baba Yaga’s Daughter

  Chicago Bang Bang

  The Age of Aquarius

  The Knight’s Tale

  Last Hand

  Chimera

  For Bryant

  From Russia, with Love

  Their mistake was in desiring my mother’s daughter.

  No: let me start at the beginning, when I listened to foolish men make foolish jests that turned, as these things always do, to even more foolish action.

  I was a barmaid, not for the money, which was poor, but for the ear to the ground; for the hearing of secrets told and of visitors arriving. My mother likes to know these things, but she is fearsome, and her hut with its chicken legs follows her wherever she goes, so she cannot easily spy. I am a simpler creature, only the daughter of a man my mother later ate, and hardly a witch at all.

  They came into our smelly little pub as a pair, the two of them dressed so fine and looking so clean. We lived on the edge of Moscow, my mother and I—at least for now, while her house was content to settle there—and the little bar where I found work was not a place that men such as these came to visit.

  The taller was red-haired and jade-eyed, and wore a coat of many colors. He smiled or laughed at everything, but his presence took the laughter of the men around him. He was a weight in the air, heating it, and even when he didn’t drag on a thin-rolled cigar, hazy blue smoke seemed to follow him.

  The other man was smaller, black-haired and black-eyed, altogether ordinary beside his tall companion. I preferred the red-head’s easy, dangerous laughter from the start: perhaps it’s because I’m my mother’s daughter that I like to play with fire. They say flame will defeat her, but I know the thing which has that power, and it is not the heart of man’s red flower.

  None of that matters now: that is not the story I am trying to tell. I am telling the story of handsome Janx and small dapper Daisani, who wore somber colors to hide from attention. I would say such a man should choose his friends more carefully, because to be friends with a brightly-plumed bird such as Janx is to draw attention, but I am my mother’s daughter, and I could see that it was more than friendship that kept these two men together. They needed each other the way the light needs the dark, the way fire needs air: not gladly, but deeply, a bond which only the end of time could break.

  They were too finely dressed for our wretched dark pub, but they were free with their coin and made new friends quickly: grubby men eager to tell tales that would keep the beer flowing. So it was no surprise to me to hear stories of my mother, for people like to frighten themselves with whispers of witches when they’re sober, and even more when they’re drunk.

  “She eats men alive,” one man said, and that was true, so I said nothing.

  “She flies on a giant mortar,” said another, and that too was true, so again, I said nothing.

  “Her house has chicken legs and goes where it wants,” said another, and once more spoke truth, and I held

  my tongue.

  “Her daughter is the most beautiful woman in the world,” said the first, and now too many things had been said, and so I said, “But Vasili, you tell me I am the most beautiful woman in the world,” and he spread his arms and spilled his grog and said, “Why then you are Baba Yaga’s daughter, and I bet neither of these fine lords can win your heart.”

  The red-head turned to me with his eyes alight, and bowed with all the grace of a man born to dancing and fine wines and sword lessons. He drew breath to speak, and the other said, “You have business here, Janx, and if you take time to play at women you will lose,” which was how I came to know Janx’s name.

  “I never lose,” Janx said with playful boldness, and what his tone told me was that he never imagined he would lose.

  His friend said, “Shall I remind you of London?” and Janx turned from the bar and from me with a flash of emerald in his gaze: a flash of fire, for all that its color was green.

  “We both of us lost in London, old friend.” There was warning in the last two words, making them entirely other than what they seemed. “We both of us lost, and you’re the one who chose to follow me to Moscow, so don’t lecture me on business or loss.”

  “I go where there are promises of riches,” Daisani said, and though they’d been speaking my language all along, he suddenly sounded as though he ought to be, deep rich avarice in the rolling words.

  “And who better to lead you there than me.” Janx came back to me and leaned across the bar to offer a sly wink and a promise that might have fallen from a gypsy’s lips: “No woman would choose to love when she knew a bet had been placed on the winning, and so I foreswear all wagers in the matter of your heart. I can’t speak to the beauty of every woman in the world, but I’ll tell the truth and say you’re the loveliest woman I’ve come upon in Russia. If Baba Yaga is your mother indeed, then her greatest magic is in giving the world a beautiful daughter.”

  I should not have, but I smiled, and I thought I had better not tell my mother what he had said. Mother is jealous of her magics, and if she thought I was the greatest of them, she’d eat me up like she did my father, to have them back inside her.

  “Janx,” Daisani said again, with more impatience, and Janx said, “Eliseo ,” which was the name I first heard for the smaller man, though in time, as his fame grew, I too came to think of him as Daisani.

  “Forgive my friend,” Janx said to me. “He’s long since misplaced a sense of humor.” Then, curiously: “Are you Baba Yaga’s daughter?”

  A fit came upon me, as sometimes happens; a fit that is the price of being my mother’s daughter. Instead of a yes or a no, this is what spilled from my lips: “That depends. Are you a son of the serpent at the heart of the world?”

  Both mens’ gazes snapped to me, and this, I think, was the moment when things went wrong indeed.

  The danger was twofold: one, that I had never seen such passion in men’s eyes, and two, that I had never felt such heat rise in me in response. Oh, I had known my share of lovers: Russian nights are long and cold and unlike my mother, I do not eat men when I’m done with them, so I have spent some time in the throes of need. But never like this, nothing so raw it tore through me and left me eager to snatch at these men, to taste them and swallow them whole and make them part of me; and that was when I wondered if my mother had begun this way.

  I did not think. I only put out a hand, and the coal shovel by the fire—an old thing, blackened with use—leapt to my fingers and I jumped onto it, not astride, but as one might stomp a spade into the earth—and commanded it whisk me away up the chimney.

  Later, I knew this to be a mistake. First, I could never return to work at my wretched little pub, for now they knew me to
be Baba Yaga’s daughter indeed, but second, and more importantly, I ran. For men such as Daisani and Janx, there is nothing more exciting than the chase.

  ***

  Beneath the uproar from astonished Russians, Janx turned to Daisani with a smile bordering on beatific, the expression of a man proven so thoroughly right that nothing in this world could upset his smug superiority. “I believe I’ve found my mark.”

  “Baba Yaga is a story made to frighten children and pass the long winter nights,” Daisani said. “You should know better.”

  “And you, of all people, should know not to dismiss stories of witches in the forest and demons in the dark. Go away, if you want. I intend to make Moscow mine, and so require the most priceless of baubles to draw my rival away.”

  “‘Your rival.’ I know his name is Rumi. After all this time, you still won’t speak their names to me first.”

  “No more than you would tell me the names of your brethren,” Janx said easily, then paused. “Would you?”

  Daisani snorted, and with no more discussion they left the pub and walked into the frozen winter night. Their breath caught in the air, turned to silver glitter, and faded behind them. “Moscow. Russia is cold, Janx. Why here?”

  “You follow me to the ends of the earth and only now ask why?” Janx sauntered along in silence a little while, then shrugged. “Because my kind aren’t inclined to go where it’s cold, and yet Rumi has been here centuries. He must guard a trinket of tremendous value to make him stay, and I simply can’t bear the idea of not having it myself.”

  “So you’ll trade away Baba Yaga’s daughter?”

  Janx blinked in astonishment. “Her daughter? Don’t be silly, Eliseo. Give over that jewel of a girl to anyone else? No, old friend, I intend to make a bargain or a bounty of the old witch herself. None of us has such a prize in our hoards, and who knows what might be done with a witch’s bones?”

  “The same that might be done with a dragon’s,” Daisani said dryly. “If you can capture her, why give her up?”

  Jade sparkled in the taller man’s eyes and Daisani dropped his chin to his chest with a sigh. “You’re a fool, Janx.”

  “But an adventuresome one,” Janx said happily. “And since you’re here, you can help me. You have her scent?”

  Daisani looked insulted, but Janx waved it off. “Go on, track her home. You’re faster by far than I am, and much more subtle.”

  Insult faded, then turned to chagrin. Daisani thinned his mouth. “I should know better than to fall for your flattery.”

  “You do know better.” Janx smiled again, the same beatific expression. “But at the end of the day, you can’t stand to not be a part of intrigues, and so you’re going to go anyway. Besides, if I take wing Rumi will know I’m here, and I’m not willing to give up that advantage just yet. I need you, old friend.” He placed a hand over his heart, green eyes wide with pleading. “Without you I have no hope.”

  “I’m mad,” Daisani said, but then there was nothing at Janx’s side but a breeze, and snow blurring into the air along a trail cut too fast for the eye to see.

  ***

  It was Daisani who caught me, and he should not have been able to do that. No: not caught; he did not capture me, but when the magic fled from my coal shovel and I came to rest at the forest’s edge—for I have not got my mother’s strength, and metal and iron will only defy the world’s pull for so long at my command—when I came to rest, small unhandsome Eliseo was at my side as though we’d walked all the way together. He twirled his fingers like a man presenting a flower to his beloved, and though nothing was there, I thought I saw a rose of silver and ice catch the moonlight and scatter shards through the frozen night air. I plucked the imaginary flower from his fingers and tucked it above my ear, seeing it all white and shining against the blackness of my hair. A gift: I should not have taken a gift from a man such as this, but doing so made me smile. “Who are you?” I asked then, “And what does it mean to be a son of the serpent at the heart of the world?”

  Daisani tilted his head, giving him the look of a curious sparrow, even to the black glitter of his gaze. “Like for like,” he said. “How does Baba Yaga’s daughter know to ask, but not know what it means?”

  Well. I was not going to answer that, and so could not demand my own answer. We stared at one another, he and I, until a smile curved his mouth. “Janx is here to collect a trinket for his treasure chest.”

  Anger flared in me, though wit told me not to rise to such bait. Still, I was no trinket, and Eliseo saw my outrage in the set of my jaw. “And you are here because you and he are bound by time and love and loathing,” I said before he could banter on. “What’s a trinket to him is a triumph to you, if you can steal it before he does. I’m neither to either of you.”

  “Ah,” he said, so lightly, “and yet you already wear my flower in your hair.”

  I reached to crush the imaginary bloom, but was stopped by Eliseo Daisani’s cold kiss. For an instant I was breathless, and then I was alone in the dark.

  ***

  “You have a stink on you,” my mother said as I came into her house. This was the trouble of being her daughter: there were no secrets, even ones I might have liked to keep. “Blood and sex and magic, and none of it made of mortal flesh. Go,” she said, without care to the ice drops forming in the air outside. “Wash yourself, or the house will eat you up. Come back when you don’t stink, and I will gnaw a bone and tell you of the serpent at the heart of the world.”

  I stared at her, a bent and ancient crone with sharp teeth and sharper eyes, and thought of the illusory rose and the brief kiss on my lips; of the magic I’d used to run away; and then I went, the obedient daughter, to scrub myself with snow.

  There is no good way to wash in a Russian winter: it is all cold and miserable, and best done wearing boots and nothing else. I might have dragged the tub from the house’s tiny porch inside and let its packed snow melt in front of the fire, but neither my mother nor the house would bear my stink that long, so I crouched under the house and washed quickly, my face stuck in a grimace against the cold.

  “Eliseo’s maligned me,” Janx murmured, light voice coming from darkness. He should not have followed me, no more than Eliseo, and not with more daring than Eliseo had shown. Eliseo, at least, had only caught me at the city’s edge, where Janx slipped into Baba Yaga’s territory, and seemed not to worry a whit. I went still, clutching my handful of scrubbing snow, a bit of prey hoping not to attract her predator’s attention. But then, I was my mother’s daughter, not prey, so made myself bold enough to stand and face him.

  He smiled and looked me all over in the moonlight. His gaze weighted me, warmed me, until I thought the frozen air had thawed even though my skin remained puckered and tight with cold. My skin, yes, though heat wakened in other parts of me, and I would have to scrub all over again to rid myself of this new stink. But he was beautiful in the half-light, a scent of cigar smoke rolling through the thin air toward me as he pulled the tub from the porch and let it thump against the ground. “It’s true I come seeking trinkets, but you’re not one I’d bargain for. I made you that promise at the pub.”

  “Why are you here?” I had an answer to that, one that made the warmth inside me conquer the frigid air, and every part of me knew that it was not wise to keep speaking with him. That I should call out to my mother, warn the house; that I should let them do as they would with the red-haired man who stood before me. Indeed, a thought trickled into my mind, that Mother and house alike should already know of his presence, that one or the other should have swept down by now to gobble him up. That neither had happened only interested me further, as though I needed something beyond the dark light in his gaze and the slim fine lines of his body to command my attention.

  “There are things I need from you, and others I desire.” Rue curved his mouth, amusement colored his eyes: we might have been in a ballroom, dancing with words as much as bodies, both knowing we said more than we should and less t
han we wished. At least, so I imagined: I knew little of ballrooms, and more than I wanted of wishes.

  “Tell me what you need,” I said unwisely, “and I’ll give you what you desire.”

  Janx smiled his insouciant smile and crouched by the tub packed with snow, putting his fingers in it. Steam hissed from the snow and melting began to spill away from his hand. I came forward, all heavy boots and cold skin, to shovel more snow into the tub with my hands, until I could step out of my boots and into scalding water.

  It splashed over the sides of the tub and made ice of the snow around it as Janx joined me, and in a very little while I thought that my mother could tell me nothing, that I had learned all I needed to know of the serpent in the heart of my world.

  That, then, was when he asked me how to capture a witch.

  ***

  I laughed, of course, and perhaps it was the sound of laughter that brought my mother from her house. She is old and crafty, and knows that when love turns to laughing, lovers are easily caught unawares. Not I: I was only surprised she had taken so long to come to us. Janx, though; well, Janx knew nothing of my mother, and was bold besides.

  He stood up from behind me, stepped out of the tub, and in the moonlight against the snow he was golden, a liquid metal god with hair blackened by water spilling over his shoulders. Snow melted around his feet, though ice would capture him soon enough if he stopped moving. As for myself, I wished my clothes were nearer, and huddled in the water to hide from cold I hadn’t felt while in his arms.

  Mother held a bauble in one hand, a thread with a blood-colored pendent dangling from it. She lifted it high and the pendant’s thin gold wire caught in the moonlight, making sharp lines across her gnarled knuckles. “Witches,” she said to Janx, “are no easier to catch than dragons, but like dragons, we look fondly on gifts. I can count back centuries, and in all that time I can think of no gifts brought to me by the one who calls Moscow his own.”