Witches: Wicked, Wild & Wonderful (29 page)

When he had gone to the shed to return the jeans, he had taken a small hand-scythe from the wall where it hung, and with it he attacked the nettle-patch in the Potter’s Field, sending the nettles flying, slashing and gutting them till there was nothing but stinging stubble on the ground.

From his pocket he took the large glass paperweight, its insides a multitude of bright colors, along with the paint pot and the paintbrush.

He dipped the brush into the paint and carefully painted, in brown paint, on the surface of the paperweight, the letters

E H

and beneath them he wrote

We don’t forget

It was almost daylight. Bedtime soon, and it would not be wise for him to be late to bed for some time to come.

He put the paperweight down on the ground that had once been a nettle patch, placed it in the place that he estimated her head would have been, and, pausing only to look at his handiwork for a moment, went through the railings and made his way, rather less gingerly, back up the hill.

“Not bad,” said a pert voice from the Potter’s Field, behind him. “Not bad at all.”

But when he turned to look, there was nobody there.

Baba Yaga is a witch from Russian folklore. A thin, ugly old woman, she lives in a forest in a hut that stands on chicken legs and can move about. She flies through the air in a giant mortar using its pestle to steer. She is a witch, but, as Andreas Johns points out in
Baba Yaga: The Ambiguous Mother and Witch of the Russian Folktale,
she takes on a number of roles in the tales about her and is not always wicked. She sometimes offers guidance and help, but the act of seeking her out is usually seen as dangerous. Vladimir Yakovlevich Propp has noted her role as a “donor” who must give the hero something needed to complete his quest—whether she wants to or not. Modern English-language authors including Orson Scott Card, Neil Gaiman, Patricia Briggs, Catherynne M. Valente, and Sarah Zettel have used the legendary witch in their fiction. There are a number of books for children featuring Baba Yaga, including
The Flying Witch
(HarperCollins, 2003), a picture book illustrated by Vladimir Vagin and written by the author of this story—Jane Yolen. “Boris Chernevsky’s Hands,” however, is a
very
different tale.

Boris Chernevsky’s Hands

Jane Yolen

Boris Chernevsky, son of the Famous Flying Chernevskys and nephew to the galaxy’s second greatest juggler, woke up unevenly. That is to say, his left foot and right hand lagged behind in the morning rituals.

Feet over the side of the bed, wiggling the recalcitrant left toes and moving the sluggish right shoulder, Boris thought about his previous night’s performance.

“Inept” had been Uncle Misha’s kindest criticism. In fact, most of what he had yelled was untranslatable and Boris was glad that his own Russian was as fumbling as his fingers. It had not been a happy evening. He ran his slow hands through his thick blond hair and sighed, wondering—and not for the first time—if he had been adopted as an infant or exchanged
in utero
for a scholar’s clone. How else to explain his general awkwardness?

He stood slowly, balancing gingerly because his left foot was now asleep, and practiced a few passes with imaginary
na
clubs. He had made his way to eight in the air and was starting an over-the-shoulder pass, when the clubs slipped and clattered to the floor. Even in his imagination he was a klutz.

His Uncle Misha said it was eye and ear coordination, that the sound of the clubs and the rhythm of their passing were what made the fine juggler. And his father said the same about flying: that one had to hear the trapeze and calculate its swing by both eye and ear. But Boris was not convinced.

“It’s in the hands,” he said disgustedly, looking down at his five-fingered disasters. They were big-knuckled and grained like wood. He flexed them and could feel the right moving just a fraction slower than the left. “It’s all in the hands. What I wouldn’t give for a better pair.”

“And what
would
you give, Boris Chernevsky?” The accent was Russian, or rather Georgian. Boris looked up, expecting to see his uncle.

There was no one in the trailer.

Boris turned around twice and looked under his bed.

Sometimes the circus little people played tricks, hiding in closets and making sounds like old clothes, singing. Their minds moved in strange ways, and Boris was one of their favorite gulls. He was so easily fooled.

“Would you, for example, give your soul?” The voice was less Georgian, more Siberian now. A touch of Tartar, but low and musical.

“What’s a soul?” Boris asked, thinking that adopted children or clones probably weren’t allowed any anyway.

“Two centuries ago,” the voice said and sighed with what sounded like a Muscovite gurgle, “everyone had a soul and no one wanted to sell. Today everyone is willing to sell, only no one seems to have one.”

By this time, Boris had walked completely around the inside of the trailer, examining the underside of chairs, lifting the samovar lid. He was convinced he was beginning to go crazy. “From dropping so many imaginary
na
clubs on my head,” he told himself out loud. He sat down on one of the chairs and breathed heavily, his chin resting on his left hand. He didn’t yet completely trust his right. After all, he had only been awake and moving for ten minutes.

Something materialized across the table from him. It was a tall, gaunt old woman whose hair looked as if birds might be nesting in it. Nasty birds. With razored talons and beaks permanently stained with blood. He thought he spotted guano in her bushy eyebrows.

“So,” the apparition said to him, “
hands
are the topic of our discussion.” Her voice, now that she was visible, was no longer melodic but grating, on the edge of a scold.

“Aren’t you a bit old for such tricks, Baba?” asked Boris, trying to be both polite and steady at once. His grandmother, may she rest in pieces on the meteorite that had broken up her circus flight to a rim world, had taught him to address old women with respect. “After all, a grandmother should be. . . . ”

“Home tending the fire and the children, I suppose.” The old woman spat into the corner, raising dust devils. “The centuries roll on and on but the Russian remains the same. The Soviets did wonders to free women up as long as they were young. Old women, we still have the fire and the grandchildren.” Her voice began to get louder and higher.
Peh,
she spat again. “Well, I for one, have solved the grandchildren problem.”

Boris hastened to reach out and soothe her. All he needed now, on top of last evening’s disastrous performance, was to have a screaming battle with some crazy old lady when his Uncle Misha and his parents, the Famous Flying, were asleep in the small rooms on either side of the trailer. “Shh, shhh,” he cautioned.

She grabbed at his reaching right hand and held it in an incredibly strong grip. Vised between her two claws, his hand could not move at all. “This, then,” she asked rhetorically, “is the offending member?”

He pulled back with all his strength, embarrassment lending him muscles, and managed to snag the hand back. He held it under the table and tried to knead feeling back into the fingers. When he looked up at her, she was smiling at him. It was not a pretty smile.

“Yes,” he admitted.

She scraped at a wen on her chin with a long, dirty fingernail. “It
seems
an ordinary enough hand,” she said. “Large knuckles. Strong veins. I’ve known peasants and tsars who would have envied you that hand.”

“
Ordinary,
” Boris began in a hoarse whisper and stopped. Then, forcing himself to speak, he began again. “Ordinary is the trouble. A juggler has to have
extraordinary
hands. A juggler’s hands must be spider web strong, bird’s wing quick.” He smiled at his metaphors. Perhaps he was a poet-clone.

The old woman leaned back in her chair and stared at a spot somewhere over Boris’s head. Her watery blue eyes never wavered. She mumbled something under her breath, then sat forward again. “Come,” she said. “I have a closet-full. All you have to do is choose.”

“Choose what?” asked Boris.

“
Hands!
” screeched the old woman. “Hands, you idiot. Isn’t that what you want?”

“
Boris,
” came his uncle’s familiar voice through the thin walls. “
Boris,
I need my sleep.”

“I’ll come. I’ll come,” whispered Boris, just to get rid of the hag. He shooed her out the door with a movement of his hands. As usual, the right was a beat behind the left, even after half a morning.

He hadn’t actually meant to go anywhere with her, just maneuver her out of the trailer, but when she leaped down the steps with surprising speed and climbed into a vehicle that looked like a mug with a large china steering rudder sticking out of the middle, his feet stepped forward of their own accord.

He fell down the stairs.

“Perhaps you could use a new pair of feet, too,” said the old woman.

Boris stood up and automatically brushed off his clothes, a gesture his hands knew without prompting.

The old woman touched the rudder and the mug moved closer to Boris.

He looked on both sides and under the mug for evidence of its motor. It moved away from him as soundlessly as a hovercraft, but when he stuck his foot under it cautiously, he could feel no telltale movement of the air.

“How do you do that?” he asked.

“Do what?”

“The mug,” he said.

“Magic.” She made a strange gesture with her hands. “After all, I am Baba Yaga.”

The name did not seem to impress Boris who was now on his hands and knees peering under the vehicle.

“Baba Yaga,” the old woman repeated as if the name itself were a charm.

“How do you do,” Boris murmured, more to the ground than to her.

“You know . . . the witch . . . Russia . . . magic. . . . ”

Her voice trailed off. When Boris made no response, she made another motion with her hands, but this time it was an Italian gesture, and not at all nice.

Boris saw the gesture and stood up. After all, the circus was his life. He knew that magic was not real, only a matter of quick hands. “Sure,” he said, imitating her last gesture. His right hand clipped his left biceps. He winced.

“Get in!” the old woman shouted.

Boris shrugged. But his politeness was complicated by curiosity. He wanted to see the inside anyway. There had to be an engine somewhere. He hoped she would let him look at it. He was good with circuitry and microchips. In a free world, he could have chosen his occupation. Perhaps he might even have been a computer programmer. But as he was a member of the Famous Flying Chernevsky family, he had no choice. He climbed over the lip of the mug and, to his chagrin, got stuck. The old woman had to pull him the rest of the way.

“You really are a klutz,” she said. “Are you sure all you want is hands?”

But Boris was not listening. He was searching the inside of the giant mug. He had just made his third trip around when it took off into the air. In less than a minute, the circus and its ring of bright trailers was only a squiggle on the horizon.

They passed quickly over the metroplexes that jigsawed across the continent and hovered over one of the twenty forest preserves. Baba Yaga pulled on the china rudder, and the mug dropped straight down. Boris fell sideways and clung desperately to the mug’s rim. Only a foot above the treetops the mug slowed, wove its way through a complicated pattern of branches, and finally landed in a small clearing.

The old woman hopped nimbly from the flier. Boris followed more slowly.

A large presence loomed to one side of the forest clearing. It seemed to be moving toward them. An enormous bird. Boris thought. He had the impression of talons. Then he looked again. It was not a bird, but a hut, and it was walking.

Boris pointed at it. “Magic?” he asked, his mouth barely shaping the syllables.

“Feet,” she answered.

“Feet?” He looked down at his feet, properly encased in Naugahyde. He looked at hers, in pointed-toe lizard skin leather. Then he looked again at the house. It was lumbering toward him on two scaly legs that ended in claws. They looked like giant replicas of the chicken feet that always floated claws-up in his mother’s chicken soup. When she wasn’t practicing being a Famous Flying, she made her great-great-grandmother’s recipes. He preferred her in the air. “Feet,” Boris said again, this time feeling slightly sick.

“But the subject is hands,” Baba Yaga said. Then she turned from him and strolled over to the hut. They met halfway across the clearing. She greeted it and it gave a half bob as if curtsying, then squatted down. The old woman opened the door and went in.

Boris followed. One part of him was impressed with the special effects, the slow part of him. The fast part was already convinced it was magic.

The house inside was even more unusual than the house outside. It was one big cupboard. Doors and shelves lined every inch of wall space. And each door and cupboard carried a hand-lettered sign. The calligraphy differed from door to door, drawer to drawer, and it took a few minutes before Boris could make out the pattern. But he recognized the lettering from the days when he had helped his Uncle Boris script broadsides for their act. There was irony in the fact that he had always had a good calligraphic hand.

In Roman Bold were “Newts, eye of,” “Adder, tongue of,” and similar biological ingredients. Then there were botanical drawers in Carolingian Italic: “Thornapple juice,” “Amanita,” and the like. Along one wall, however, marked in basic Foundational Bold were five large cupboards marked simply: “Heads,” “Hands,” “Feet,” “Ears,” “Eyes.”

The old woman walked up to that wall and threw open the door marked “Hands.”

“There,” she said.

Inside, on small wooden stands, were hundreds of pairs of hands. When the light fell on them, they waved dead-white fingers as supple and mindless as worms.