A Tale of the Baba Yaga
Any forest path might lead to the Baba Yaga’s house. The girl chooses one and follows it.
Day gallops past on a white horse. Noon gallops past on a red horse, fierce as the high sun. Night gallops past on a black horse.
Now the night wind comes. The trees groan and screech and bow before it. Their twigs claw at the girl’s hair and skin.
The path ends at a clearing. Ahead is a fence of bones with a human skull perched on each upright. Beyond it, a crooked hut balanced on giant chicken feet.
The girl looks up.
The Baba Yaga sails on the rollicking storm, an iron mortar for her boat, a pestle for a sail, a birch twig broom for a rudder. ‘Turn to greet me, turn to meet me, little house!’ she cries, and the dark air is full of her voice, like the cawing of a thousand crows.
The hut lifts one great scaly foot, lowers it, lifts the other foot, dances a slow clumsy dance until its door faces the Baba Yaga and the hut settles itself once more.
The eye sockets of the skulls spark and burn as the Baba Yaga descends, brighter and brighter until the clearing fills with their fiery glow.
The Baba Yaga climbs out from the mortar and spits a spell at the bone gate. The gate creaks open.
‘Well?’ says the Baba Yaga, turning her head with its grey mane of tangle and twig and feather and dead leaf. Her gaze fixes on the girl who has come along the path. ‘Beautiful child, motherless child, what is it that you want from old Baba Yaga?’
The girl shudders then gathers herself. ‘My stepmother sent me,’ she says, ‘to ask you for fire to take home, for my stepsisters put out our own fires and now they cannot warm themselves nor cook their food nor light their ways to bed.’
The Baba Yaga smiles like a wolf. She looks the girl up and down, sees soups and roasts and casseroles she can make from that tender flesh. Such a sweet child, such a succulent child.
But there are protocols, even for cannibals.
‘Come on inside, then,’ says the Baba Yaga. ‘And share some supper with me, and rest awhile, and tomorrow you shall do some chores for me and then, if I am satisfied, I shall give you fire.’
So the girl warms herself at the Baba Yaga’s hearth, and eats the morsel of bread and pork that the Baba Yaga gives her, and drinks the honey ale that the Baba Yaga pours for her.
‘Well then,’ says the Baba Yaga when they finish eating. ‘Now I shall tell you the tasks you must perform tomorrow, after I ride away into the sky. You must sweep the yard and the house and prepare my supper. You must take a quart of wheat from my storehouse and pick out all the grit and black grains and wild peas, and then take a half measure of poppy seeds and pick out all the earth mixed in with them.’
Then the Baba Yaga goes to her bed, click-clack of her old bones as she climbs the stairs.
The girl curls up on the bench, closes her eyes, tries not to hear the terrible sound of the Baba Yaga filing her teeth in the room above. The girl thinks about all the chores she’s promised to do tomorrow and she already knows that the crone has set her an impossible task.
Tears burn in her eyes. She wishes her mother was still alive to tell her what she should do. Then she remembers the tiny wooden doll her mother gave her as she lay on her deathbed, the doll the girl slipped into her coat pocket and, in her grief, forgot all about until now. ‘Give the doll a little something to eat and a little something to drink,’ her mother had said. ‘Then tell her your troubles and she will help you.’
The girl searches through the pockets of her coat. She pulls out all her treasures: acorns and pine cones, owl pellets and smooth white pebbles. And tucked at the very bottom of the deepest pocket is the tiny doll.
Gently she holds it, gazes at it in the flickering firelight. Then she gives the doll a little something to eat and a little something to drink, just as her mother told her to.
The little doll’s eyes start to shine. Its tiny hands open and close. It yawns and stretches. The girl tells it about the Baba Yaga’s impossible demands and the doll listens until she is done.
‘Do not worry,’ says the doll. ‘Tomorrow you shall rest and leave everything to me.’
Next morning, the Baba Yaga rises with the sun and off she goes in her iron mortar, cackling away above the treetops. The girl takes the tiny doll from her pocket and gives it something to eat and something to drink. Then, still tired from her long walk through the forest, the girl falls asleep again on the bench by the hearth.
The doll wakes her at sunset. The yard and the house are swept clean. The wheat and the poppy seeds have been sorted. A supper of stew for the Baba Yaga is simmering.
Outside the wind howls through the trees and the Baba Yaga’s iron mortar clangs as it sets down in the yard. The girl slips the little doll into her pocket.
In comes the Baba Yaga. She searches everywhere for dust and dirt, but the little doll has done its job well and there’s not a speck to be found. Then the Baba Yaga checks the wheat and the poppy seeds, and finds every bad grain and every bit of dirt removed.
And there is her supper, bubbling away in a pan on the stove.
The Baba Yaga’s wrinkled face tautens with rage. Her lips snarl back from her teeth. Each tooth filed to a point.
But there are protocols, even for cannibals.
‘Child,’ says the Baba Yaga, ‘it seems that you have done all that I asked, and done it so well that I can find no fault. Tell me, what magic did you call upon?’
The girl’s hand closes around the tiny doll in her pocket but she says only, ‘The magic of my dead mother’s blessing.’
‘There’s no place for blessings in my house,’ the Baba Yaga says. ‘Step outside and I will give you the fire that you came for.’
In the yard, the Baba Yaga plucks a skull from the bone fence and gives it to the girl. The skull’s eyes burn fierce as embers. ‘Here is your fire, child,’ says the Baba Yaga. ‘Think on this as you go home. Your stepmother and stepsisters sent you to me because they did not believe you would survive your visit. They will try again to kill you, as surely as night follows day.’
Clutching the skull to her chest, the girl sets off along the forest path.
Ivan Bilibin, 1902Night gallops past on a black horse. Day gallops past on a white horse. Noon gallops past on a red horse, fierce as the high sun.
As the sky dims towards evening again, the girl’s arms ache from carrying the skull. She looks down at it, the dirty white bone with its skeins of hair-thin cracks. Suddenly it disgusts and saddens her so much that the fire it contains no longer seems to matter.
She tosses the skull into the undergrowth.
Then the skull calls out to her. ‘Do not cast me away, child,’ it says. ‘Remember your promise and take me to your stepmother.’
The girl sighs. She fetches the skull from the tangle of brambles and carries it home.
As she walks up the path to the house, her stepmother rushes out to greet her. ‘There you are, at last!’ she cries, her voice harsh with spite. ‘We’ve had no fire in all this time!’
And it’s true. Inside, the house is cold and dark.
Just as well the Baba Yaga didn’t butcher me as you intended, the girl thinks to herself.
Her stepmother seizes the skull and sets it upon the kitchen table. She holds a spill to the skull’s ember eyes and the spill bursts into flame. The skull’s eyes blaze brighter and hotter, until the room shivers with fire and the stepmother’s flesh melts from her bones like candle wax.
Next, the skull sets its fiery gaze upon the girl’s vicious stepsisters and they spin briefly in garlands of flame before collapsing beside their mother, ashes and charred bone.
Then the skull’s eyes dim until there is only a terrible darkness.
The girl closes her hand around the tiny doll in her pocket, and sits on the doorstep and waits for morning.
Note: It is the nature of folk tales told and retold in myriad versions. This is my own version of ‘Vasilisa the Beautiful and the Baba Yaga’.
