Baba Yaga Part Two

Read Part One here

PART TWO

 We were digging in the vegetable garden behind the house the first time we kissed. We worked with our hands, feeling the earth beneath our fingers and between our toes. I thought that maybe I could feel the life that she talked about, an energy in the earth. Sometimes I thought I felt sparks of it, tingling against my fingertips. The earth’s life force. The purest magic possible. This was Yanuschka’s magic. She wove it, strengthened it. Guided it into the plants to help them grow. She never took more than she gave back, she always respected nature.

 Some say it’s a woman’s job to tend the garden. What they don’t understand is that it’s not about gender. It’s about intuition, communing with nature. Women are closet to the earth, to life and death. Men can find it too, though, that closeness. Most men and women, though, are blind to it. They don’t care to understand. They kill the earth with bad farming practices, not allowing the earth time to renew. Yanuschka was teaching me this.

Our hands dug together in the dirt, no tools. We didn’t want to hurt the worms, who worked the soil so patiently, or damage the little seedlings. Our fingers met and interlocked, as if they belonged together. Our nails were caked with dirt, the earth rich and fragrant. No, not dirt. Earth wasn’t dirty, it was the cleanest, purest thing there was.

Our fingers intertwined, the sparks in my fingertips tingling stronger than ever. I knew this was coming from her.

 The sparks that leapt between us could not be denied. Her mouth opened to meet mine. I’d never kissed anyone before, but somehow I knew what to do. It felt right. Her mouth tasted of cinnamon, her kiss was so soft and hesitant. My hands untangled from hers and reached up to stroke her face, leaving streaks of earth. I wondered how I could have waited so long for this.

 We broke apart, breathless. I watched her face, trying to see if she had felt the same way as I did. My feelings were in a muddle. There were tears in her eyes, I wondered if I had done the wrong things.

 “Yanuschka”, I said in a quavering voice.

 “Such strong magic”, she whispered, “I’ve never felt it like this before.”

 “I don’t understand.”

 “When you touched my hand, when we kissed. There was wild magic in you. So much magic that it spilled over. Into me, into the earth. It was the most amazing thing I felt. You don’t know how special you are, Maraya!”

 “I’m not special, I’m just a runaway. A nobody.”

 “You’re not. There’s no such thing as a nobody. Everyone is somebody, whether they know it yet or not. Everybody is special, Maraya!”

I didn’t know then what she meant, but the idea that I was special to her was enough for the moment. For the first time, somebody loved me. That was special. She was special.

If only things could have stayed that way. Just the three of us in our little house in the forest. For a time we were safe there, so safe that I thought it would always be so. I began to forget the past.

Forgetting is always dangerous. I forgot to be wary, forgot to listen and look out for anything strange, for any sign that they had found me. I was a fool.

It had been a year. There was no calendar, but we marked the way the seasons changed. We were so close to nature, we knew them all. Surely, after a year, a father that so despised his daughter would have stopped looking for her? I had forgotten what that man was like, his dogged determination. He had nearly died in a snowstorm when I was five, tracking down a deer that had evaded him for days. He had brought it back on his shoulders, two fingers and three toes dead and black from frostbite. He lost his fingers and toes because he could not bear for anyone or anything to defy him. I let myself forget that.

Yanuschka let me help weave the webs, too. My magic added a different element, a different style to them. My weaving was more abstract, the threads thicker. It wasn’t as beautiful as Yanuschka’s. But the interweaving of the two threads had a harmony to it, and our two magics together made it stronger.

For a year, I had been weaving my fear into that web, but now it was gone. There was only love in my magic. I thought that made me stronger. I was wrong.

I had learned to read the stories in Yanuschka’s web. I knew her tale.

Yanuschka was an inquisitive child, always wanting to know how and why. It drove her mother to frustration. Why, why why? Why couldn’t Yanuschka be like other little girls? As Yanuschka grew into a young woman, her family were frustrated as she turned down all her suitors. They could not understand that she wanted more. She wanted to understand the universe, to know how she worked, to understand the power she felt in the earth and trees.

One day, when Yanuschka was walking in the woods, as she often did, ignoring her parents warnings of brigands and witches, she heard a whispering. She looked around but there was nobody there. Yanuschka closed her eyes and concentrated on listening. When she opened her eyes, she knew that the sound was coming from her left, a juniper bush covered in berries. She moved closer, the sound was coming from the bush itself. As if in a trance, she reached out and plucked one of the berries. For a moment, all was silent, then there was a rushing sound in her ears, and when it was gone, she could hear all kinds of sounds she had never heard before. She could hear the voices of the plants, talking to her. Loudest of all was the juniper bush, which had given her this gift.

It was some time after that Yanuschka’s swelling belly gave away the fact that she was pregnant. Her parents were furious, thinking she must have a lover, a married man, perhaps, since she would not reveal his identity. She tried to explain that she had only eaten the berries of the juniper bush, but they did not believe her. They awaited the birth of her child with impatience, hoping that the child’s features would reveal his parentage. If the man was already married, Yanuschka must become his second wife, or third. It was not uncommon in their village. At least then, there would not be so much shame on their family.

They didn’t know the worst was yet to come. For when Yanuschka gave birth to her child, in front of the village midwife, it was a grey kitten. A kitten born with its eyes and ears open, whose mewling sometimes sounded suspiciously like human speech.

Yanuschka would allow no one near her son, knowing that they would drown him, given half a chance. There was already talk of his being a demon. Vanya had wisdom no cat should have. He was a soul reborn a thousand times. He had seen the oceans rise and fall, the earth covered by ice and fire. He had travelled the earth in many forms: man, woman, bird, cat. He had lived for a time as the juniper bush. He would be reborn again and again. He would teach Yanuschka all she wanted to know, for in his thousands of years of life, he had learned most of the secrets of the universe. Together, they would learn the rest.

When Yanuschka finally ventured out of her home on one of her walks, Vanya weaving in and out of her legs, the townspeople threw stones, yelling that Vanya was a demon and Yanuschka the devil’s whore.

Once she was well enough, they left the town for good, moving to the middle of the forest where we now lived.

As a cat, Vanya had trouble weaving magic himself, but he taught Yanuschka. In a few years, she had learned to build the webs of protection, and to nurture the plants in the garden. They were lucky to find the abandoned woodsman’s hut we now lived in, as the magic of nature would have been no help in lifting logs to build such a sturdy home.

Yanushkas’s webs spoke less of the past now, and more of the future. Our future. We were both distracted. We were both weak.

When the men came into the clearing that day, they walked straight through the protection webs, as if they weren’t there at all. 

Read part 3 here

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This story has been a long time in the writing. I first began it in 2011, lost most of the notes (which were in hardcopy) until 2021, and finally finished it in January this year. 

(c)opyright Laura Morrigan 2011-2022