The Historian

Chapter 69

"Those two days at Bachkovo were some of the longest of my life. I wanted to hurry to the promised festival immediately, wanted it to occur instantly, so that we could try to follow the one word of that song - dragon - to its nesting place. Yet I also dreaded the moment that I thought must inevitably come, when this possible clue, too, would vanish in smoke, or turn out to be related to nothing at all. Helen had already warned me that folk songs were notoriously slippery; their origins tended to be lost over centuries, their texts changed and evolved, their singers seldom knew where they'd come from or how old they were. 'That's what makes them folk songs,' she said wistfully, smoothing my shirt collar as we sat in the courtyard our second day at the monastery. She was not given to domestic little caresses like that one, so I knew she must be worried. My eyes burned and my head ached as I looked around the sunny cobbles where the chickens scratched. It was a beautiful place, a rare and for me exotic place, and here we were seeing its life flow on as it had since the eleventh century: the chickens looked for bugs, the kitten rolled near our feet, the brilliant light pulsed on the fine red-and-white stonework all around us. I could hardly feel its beauty anymore.
"On the second morning, I woke very early. I thought perhaps I'd heard the church bells ringing but couldn't decide if that had been part of my dream. From the window of my cell, with its rough curtain, I could see four or five monks making their way into the church. I put on my clothes - God, they were dirty now, but I could not be bothered with washing clothes - and went quietly down the gallery stairs to the courtyard. It was very early indeed, dusky outside, and the moon was setting over the mountains. I thought for a moment of entering the church and lingered near the door, which was open; from inside spilled candlelight and a smell of burning wax and incense, and the interior that looked profoundly dark at midday was warm and beckoning at this hour. I could hear the monks chanting. The melancholy swell of the sound went into my heart like a dagger. They had probably been doing just this, some dim morning in 1477 when Brothers Kiril and Stefan and the other monks had left the graves of their martyred friends - in the ossuary? - and set off through the mountains, guarding the treasure in their wagon. But which direction had they gone? I faced east, then west - where the moon was dropping out of sight very fast - then south.
"A breeze had begun to stir the leaves of the lindens, and after a few minutes I saw the first light of the sun reaching far across the slopes and over the monastery wall. Then, belatedly, a rooster crowed somewhere in the confines of the monastery. It would have been a moment of exquisite pleasure, the kind of immersion in history I'd always dreamed of, if I'd had the heart for it. I found myself turning slowly, willing myself to intuit the direction Brother Kiril had traveled. Somewhere out there was a tomb - maybe - whose location had been lost so long that even the knowledge of it had vanished. It might be a day's journey on foot, or three hours, or a week. 'Not much farther and without incident,' Zacharias had said. How far was not much farther? Where had they gone? The earth was stirring now - those forested mountains with their dusty outcroppings of rock, the cobbled courtyard under my feet and the monastery meadows and farm - but it kept its secret."
"At about nine that morning we set off in Ranov's car with Brother Ivan navigating in the front seat. We took the road along the river for about ten kilometers, and then the river seemed to disappear, and the road followed a long, dry valley, which looped precipitously around among hills. The sight of this landscape jarred something in my memory. I nudged Helen and she frowned at me. 'Helen, the river valley.'
"Her face cleared then, and she tapped Ranov on the shoulder. 'Ask Brother Ivan where the river went. Did we cross it somewhere?'
"Ranov spoke to Brother Ivan without turning and reported back to us. 'He says the river dried up here - it is behind us now, where we crossed the last bridge. This was the river valley a long time ago, but there is no more water in the valley.' Helen and I looked silently at each other. Ahead of us, at the end of the valley, I saw two peaks rising sharply out of the hills, two lone mountains like angular wings. And between them, still far off, we could see the towers of a little church. Helen suddenly grasped my hand hard.
"A few minutes later we turned up a dirt track into broad hills, obeying a sign for a village I'll call Dimovo. Then the road narrowed and Ranov pulled up in front of the church, although Dimovo itself was nowhere in sight.
"The Church of Sveti Petko the Martyr was very small - a weathered stucco chapel - and it sat by itself in a meadow that might have been used for haying late in the season. Two crooked oak trees made a shelter above it, and next to it huddled a graveyard of a sort I hadn't seen before - peasant graves, some of them dating back to the eighteenth century, Ranov explained proudly. 'This is traditional - there are many such places where the rural workers are buried even today.' The grave markers were stone or wood, with a triangular cap at the top, and many had small lamps set at their bases. 'Brother Ivan says the ceremony will not begin until eleven-thirty,' Ranov told us as we lingered there. 'They are preparing the church now. He will take us to visit Baba Yanka first, and then we will return to observe everything.' He gave us a hard look, as if to see what interested us most.
"'What's going on there?' I pointed to a group of men working in the field next to the church. Some were dragging wood - logs and great branches - into a pile, while others set down bricks and stones around them. They had already collected a vast arsenal from the forest.
"'Brother Ivan says that is for the fire. I had not realized this, but there will be walking in the fire.'
"'Fire walking!' Helen exclaimed.
"'Yes,' Ranov said flatly. 'You know of this custom? It is rare in Bulgaria in this modern era, and even rarer in this part of the country. I have heard of fire walking only in the Black Sea region. But this is a poor and superstitious area that the Party is still working to improve. I have no doubt such things will be eliminated eventually.'
"'I have heard of this.' Helen turned earnestly to me. 'It was a pagan custom, and it became a Christian one in the Balkans as the people were converted. Usually it is not so much walking as dancing. I am very glad we will get to watch such a thing.'
"Ranov shrugged and herded us away toward the church, but not before I'd seen one of the men working around the wood suddenly lean forward and ignite the pile. It caught quickly and blazed up, then spread, then began to roar. The wood was tinder dry and the flames soon reached the top of the pile, so that every branch glowed. Even Ranov stood still. The men who'd built it stepped back a few feet, then a few more, and stood wiping their hands on their trousers. With a rush the fire leaped fully to life. The flames were nearly as high as the roof of the church nearby, although far enough from it for safety. We watched the fire eating this enormous meal until Ranov turned away again. 'They will let it burn and die for the next few hours,' he said. 'Even the most superstitious would not dance in it now.'
"As we entered the church, a young man, apparently the priest, came forward to greet us. He shook our hands with a pleasant smile, and he and Brother Ivan bowed cordially to each other. 'He says he's honored to have you here for their saint's day,' Ranov reported a little dryly.
"'Tell him we are honored to be able to see the festival. Would you ask him who Sveti Petko is?' "The priest explained that he was a local martyr, killed by the Turks during their occupation for his refusal to give up his faith. Sveti Petko had been the priest of an earlier church on this site, which the Turks had burned, and even after his church was destroyed he had refused to accept the Muslim faith. This church had been erected later and his relics interred in the old crypt. Today, many people would come to kneel there. His special icon, and two others of great power, would be carried in procession around the church and through the fire. Here was Sveti Petko, painted on the front wall of the church - he pointed to a faded fresco behind him, which showed a bearded face not unlike his own. We should come back and take a tour of the church when he had everything ready. We were welcome to see the whole ceremony and to receive the blessing of Sveti Petko. We would not be the first pilgrims from other lands who had come to him and been relieved of sickness or pain. The priest smiled sweetly at us.
"I asked him through Ranov if he had ever heard of a monastery called Sveti Georgi. He shook his head. 'The nearest monastery isBachkovski, ' he said. 'Sometimes monks from other monasteries have come here on pilgrimage, too, over the years - mostly long ago.' I took this to mean that pilgrimages had probably ceased since the communist takeover, and made a mental note to ask Stoichev about this when we got back to Sofia.
"'I will ask him to find Baba Yanka for us,' Ranov said after a moment. The priest knew exactly which house was hers. He wished he could go with us, but the church had been closed up for months - he came here only on holidays -  so he and his assistant still had much to do.
"The village lay in a hollow just below the meadow where the church stood, and it was the smallest community I'd seen since coming to the East Bloc: no more than fifteen houses huddled almost fearfully together, with apple trees and flourishing vegetable gardens around the outskirts, dirt paths just wide enough for a wagon to drive through the middle, an ancient well with a wooden pole and bucket hanging over it. I was struck by the utter lack of modernity and found myself reading it for signs of the twentieth century. Apparently this century was not occurring there at all. I felt almost betrayed when I saw a white plastic bucket in the side yard of one of the stone houses. These houses seemed to have grown up out of piles of gray rock, their upper stories stuccoed as an afterthought, their roofs made of smooth slate shingles. Some of them boasted beautiful old half-timbered ornamentation that would have looked at home in a Tudor village.
"As we entered Dimovo's one street, people began to come out of their houses and barns to greet us - mainly old people, many of them gnarled almost beyond belief from hard labor, the women grotesquely bowlegged, the men hunched forward as if perpetually carrying an invisible sack of something heavy. Their faces were brown-skinned, red-cheeked - they smiled and called greetings, and I saw the flash of toothless gums or glinting metal in their mouths. At least they got some dental work, I thought, although it was hard to imagine where or how. A few of them came forward to bow to Brother Ivan, and he blessed them and seemed to be making inquiries among them. We walked to Baba Yanka's house in the midst of a small crowd, the youngest members of whom might have been seventy, although Helen told me later that these peasants were probably twenty years younger than they looked to me.
"Baba Yanka's house was a very small one, barely a cottage, and it leaned heavily against a little barn. She herself had made her way to her front door to see what was going on; my first glimpse of her was the bright spot of her red-flowered head scarf, then her striped bodice and apron. She peered out, looking at us, and some of the other villagers shouted her name, which made her nod her head rapidly. The skin of her face was mahogany, her nose and chin sharp, her eyes - as we came nearer and nearer - apparently brown but lost in folds of wrinkles. "Ranov called out something to her - I could only hope it wasn't anything commanding or disrespectful - and after staring at us for a few minutes, she shut the wooden door. We waited quietly outside, and when it opened again I saw she was not as tiny as I'd imagined; she came solidly up to Helen's shoulder and her eyes were merry in a cautious face. She kissed Brother Ivan's hand and we shook hands with her, which seemed at first to confuse her. Then she shooed us into the house as if we'd been a pack of runaway chickens. "Her house was very poor inside, but clean, and I noticed with a twinge of sympathy that she'd ornamented it with a vase of fresh wildflowers, which sat on the scratched, scrubbed table. Helen's mother's house had been a mansion compared to this neat, broken-down room with a ladder to the second floor nailed against one wall. I wondered how long Baba Yanka would be able to navigate the ladder, but she was moving around the room with so much energy that it slowly dawned on me that she was not actually old. I whispered this to Helen and Helen nodded. 'Fifty, perhaps,' she whispered back.
"This hit me with fresh force. My own mother, in Boston, was fifty-two, and she could have been this woman's granddaughter. Baba Yanka's hands were as gnarled as her feet were light; I watched her bring out cloth-covered dishes and set glasses before us and wondered what she'd done with those hands all her life to make them look like that. Felled trees, perhaps, chopped firewood, harvested crops, worked in cold and heat. She stole a glance or two at us as she worked, each glance accompanied by a quick smile, and finally poured us a beverage - something white and thick - which Ranov downed at once, nodding to her and wiping off his mouth with his handkerchief. I followed suit, but it almost killed me; the stuff was lukewarm and tasted distinctly of barnyard floor. I tried not to gag visibly while Baba Yanka twinkled at me. Helen drank hers with dignity and Baba Yanka patted her hand. 'Sheep's milk blended with water,' Helen told me. 'Think of it as a milk shake.'
"'I will ask her now if she will sing,' Ranov told us. 'That is what you want, is it not?' He conferred for a moment with Brother Ivan, who turned on Baba Yanka. The woman shrank back, nodding desperately. No, she would not sing; clearly, she didn't want to. She gestured at us and put her hands under her apron. But Brother Ivan was persistent.
"'We will ask her to sing whatever she wants to sing first,' Ranov explained.
'Then you may ask her about the song that interests you.'
"Baba Yanka appeared to have resigned herself, and I wondered if her whole protest had been a ritual of modesty, because she was already smiling again. She sighed, then drew her shoulders up under her worn, red-flowered blouse. She looked at us without guile and opened her mouth. The sound that came out was astonishing; first of all it was astonishingly loud, so that the glasses all but rattled on the table and the people outside the open door - half the village seemed to have gathered - stuck their heads in. It vibrated from the walls and under our feet and made her strings of onions and peppers sway above the battered stove. I took Helen's hand, secretly. First one note shook us, and then another, each long and slow, each a wail of deprivation and hopelessness. I remembered the maiden who leaped from a high cliff rather than be taken into the pasha's harem and wondered if this was a similar text. But strangely enough, Baba Yanka smiled with every note, breathing in huge sections of air, beaming at us. We listened in stunned silence until she suddenly ceased; the last note seemed to go on and on in the tiny house.
"'Please ask her to tell us the words,' Helen said.
"With some apparent struggle - which didn't diminish her smile - Baba Yanka recited the words of the song, and Ranov translated.
The hero lay dying at the top of the green mountain.
The hero lay dying with nine wounds in his side.
O, you falcon, fly to him and tell him his men are safe,
Safe in the mountains, all his men.
The hero had nine wounds in his side,
But it was the tenth that killed him.
"Baba Yanka clarified some point with Ranov when she was done, beaming still and shaking a finger at him. I had the feeling she would spank him and send him to bed without supper if he did anything wrong in her house. 'Ask her how old the song is,' Helen prompted him, 'and where she learned it.'
"Ranov put the question and Baba Yanka burst into peals of laughter, gesturing over her shoulder, waving her hands. Ranov actually grinned. 'She says it is as old as the mountains and not even her great-grandmother knew how old that was. She learned it from her great-grandmother, who lived to be ninety-three.'
"Next Baba Yanka had questions for us. When she fixed her eyes on us, I saw that they were wonderful eyes, almond shaped under the weathering of sun and wind, and golden brown, almost amber, made brighter by the red of her kerchief. She nodded, apparently in disbelief, when we told her we were from America.
"'Amerika?' She appeared to ponder this. 'That must be beyond the mountain.' "'She's a very ignorant old woman,' Ranov amended. 'The government is doing its best to raise the standard of education here. It is an important priority.' "Helen had gotten out a piece of paper and now she took the old woman's hand. 'Ask her if she knows a song like this - you will have to translate it for her. "The dragon came down our valley. He burned the crops and took the maidens."' Ranov passed this on to Baba Yanka. She listened attentively for a moment, and suddenly her face contracted with fear and displeasure; she drew back in her wooden chair and crossed herself quickly. 'Ne!' she said vehemently, withdrawing her hand from Helen's. 'Ne, ne.'
"Ranov shrugged. 'You understand. She doesn't know it.'
"'Clearly she does,' I said quietly. 'Ask her why she is afraid to tell us about it.'
"This time the old woman looked stern. 'She won't talk about it,' Ranov said.
"'Tell her we will give her a reward.' Ranov's eyebrows went up again, but he put the offer to Baba Yanka. 'She says we must shut the door.' He got up and quietly closed the doors and wooden shutters, blocking out the spectators in the street. 'Now she will sing.'
"There couldn't have been a greater contrast between Baba Yanka's performance of the first song and her performance of this one. She seemed to shrink in her chair, huddling down in the seat and looking at the floor. Her jolly smile was gone, and her amber eyes fixed on our feet. The melody that came out of her was certainly a melancholy one, although the last line of the verse seemed to me to end on a defiant note. Ranov translated carefully. Why, I wondered again, was he being so helpful?
The dragon came down our valley.
He burned the crops and took the maidens.
He frightened the Turkish infidel and protected our villages.
His breath dried up the rivers and we walked across them.
Now we must defend ourselves.
The dragon was our protector,
But now we defend ourselves against him.
"'Well,' Ranov said. 'Is that what you wanted to hear?'
"'Yes.' Helen patted Baba Yanka's hand and the old woman broke out in a scolding voice. 'Ask her where this one is from and why she fears it,' Helen requested.
"Ranov needed a few minutes to sort through Baba Yanka's reproaches. 'She learned this song in secret from her great-grandmother, who told her never to sing it after dark. The song is an unlucky song. It sounds lucky but it is unlucky. They do not sing it here except on Saint George's Day. That is the only day you can sing it safely, without bringing bad luck. She hopes you have not made her cow die in this way, or worse.'
"Helen smiled. 'Tell her I have a reward for her, a gift that takes away all bad luck and puts good luck in its place.' She opened Baba Yanka's worn hand and put a silver medallion in it. 'This belongs to a very devout and wise man and he sends it to you for your protection. It shows Sveti Ivan Rilski, a great Bulgarian saint.' I realized that this must be the little object Stoichev had put into Helen's hand. Baba Yanka looked at it for a moment, turning it on her rough palm, then raised it to her lips and kissed it. She tucked it into some secret compartment in her apron. 'Blagodarya,' she said. She kissed Helen's hand, too, and sat fondling it as if she had found a long-lost daughter. Helen turned to Ranov again. 'Please just ask her if she knows what the song means and where it came from. And why do they sing it on Saint George's Day?'
"Baba Yanka shrugged at this. 'The song means nothing. It is just an unlucky old song. My great-grandmother told me that some people believed it came from a monastery. But that is not possible, because monks do not sing such songs - they sing the praises of God. We sing it on Saint George's Day because it invites Sveti Georgi to kill the dragon and end his torture of the people.'
"'What monastery?' I cried. 'Ask her if she knows of a monastery called Sveti Georgi, one that disappeared a long time ago.'
"But Baba Yanka only nodded - no - and clicked her tongue. 'There is no monastery here. The monastery is at Bachkovo. We have only the church, where I will sing with my sister this afternoon.'
"I groaned and made Ranov try one more time. This time he clicked his tongue too. 'She says she knows of no monastery. There has never been a monastery here.'
"'When is Saint George's Day?' I asked.
"'On May sixth.' Ranov stared me down. 'You have missed it by several weeks.'
"I was silent, but in the meantime Baba Yanka had cheered up again. She shook our hands and kissed Helen and made us promise to hear her singing that afternoon - 'It is much better with my sister. She sings the second voice.'
"We told her we would be there. She insisted on giving us some lunch, which she had been preparing when we came in; it was potatoes and a kind of gruel, and more of the sheep's milk, which I thought I might be able to get used to if I stayed a few months. We ate as gratefully as we could, praising her cooking, until Ranov told us we should go back to the church if we wanted to see the beginning of the service. Baba Yanka parted from us reluctantly, squeezing our hands and arms and patting Helen's cheeks.
"The fire next to the church had almost burned down now, although a few logs still flamed on top of the coals, pale in the bright afternoon sun. The villagers were already beginning to gather near the church, even before its bells began to ring. The bells rang and rang in the small stone tower at its peak, and then the young priest came to the door. He was dressed in red and gold now, with a long embroidered cape over his robes and a black shawl draped over his hat. He carried a smoking censer on a gold chain, which he swung in three directions outside the church door.
"The people gathered there - women dressed like Baba Yanka in stripes and flowers or in black from head to toe, and men in rough brown woolen vests and trousers, with white shirts tied or buttoned at their necks - fell back as the priest emerged. He came out among them, blessing them with the sign of the cross, and some of them bowed their heads or bent over in front of him. Behind him came an older man, dressed like a monk in plain black, whom I took to be his assistant. This man held an icon in his arms, which was draped with purple silk. I got a quick glimpse of it - a stiff, pale, dark-eyed visage. This must be Sveti Petko, I thought. The villagers followed the icon silently around the edge of the church in a streaming mass, many of them walking with canes or leaning on the arms of the younger ones. Baba Yanka found us and took my arm proudly, as if to show her neighbors what good connections she had. Everyone stared at us; it occurred to me that we were getting at least as much attention as the icon.
"The two priests led us in silence around the back of the church and along the other side, where we could see the fire ring at a short distance and smell the smoke that rose from it. The flames were dying down, unattended, the last great logs and branches already a deep orange, all of it settling into a mass of coals. We made this procession three times around the church, and then the priest halted again at the church porch and began to chant. Sometimes his elderly assistant answered him, and sometimes the congregation murmured a response, crossing themselves or bowing. Baba Yanka had let go of my arm, but she stayed close to us. Helen was watching everything with a keen interest, I saw, and so was Ranov.
"At the end of this outdoor ceremony, we followed the congregation into the church, which was dark as a tomb after the brilliance of the fields and groves. It was a small church, but the interior had a kind of exquisite scale the bigger churches we'd seen couldn't boast. The young priest had put the icon of Sveti Petko in a place of honor near the front, propped on a carved podium. I noticed Brother Ivan bowing before the altar. As usual, there were no pews; the people stood or knelt on the cold stone floor, and a few old women prostrated themselves in the center of the church. The side walls contained niches that were frescoed or housed icons, and in one of them yawned a dark opening that I thought must go down to the crypt. It was easy to imagine centuries of peasant worship here and in the older church that had stood here before this one.
"After what seemed like an eternity, the chanting ceased. The people bowed once more and began to drift out of the church, some of them stopping here and there to kiss icons or to light candles, which they placed in the iron candelabra near the entrance. The church bells began to ring and we followed the villagers outdoors again, where the sun and breeze and brilliant fields smote us without warning. A long table had been set out under some trees, and women were already uncovering dishes there and pouring something from ceramic pitchers. Then I saw there was a second fire pit on this side of the church, a small one, where a spitted lamb hung. Two men were cranking it around and around over the coals and the smell brought a primitive watering to my mouth. Baba Yanka filled our plates for us herself and took us to a blanket away from the crowd. There we met her sister, who looked just like her except taller and thinner, and we all gorged on the good food. Even Ranov, folding his legs in their city suit carefully on the woven blanket, seemed almost content. Other villagers stopped by to greet us and to ask Baba Yanka and her sister when they would be singing, an attention they waved away with the dignity of opera stars.
"When the lamb had been completely devoured and the women were scraping the dishes over a wooden bucket, I noticed that three men had brought out musical instruments and were preparing to play. One of them had the oddest instrument I had ever seen up close - a bag made of cleaned white animal skin with wooden pipes sticking out of it. It was clearly a kind of bagpipe, and Ranov told us that it was an ancient instrument in Bulgaria, the gaida, made of the skin of a goat. The old man who cradled it in his arms gradually blew it up like a great balloon; this process took a good ten minutes and he was bright red before he'd finished. He nestled it under his arm and puffed into one of the pipes and everyone cheered and applauded. It had the sound of an animal, too, a loud bleat, a shriek or squawk, and Helen laughed. 'You know,' she told me, 'there is a bagpipe in every herding culture in the world.'
"Then the old man began to play, and after a moment his friends joined him, one on a long wooden flute, whose voice swirled around us in a fluid ribbon, and the other beating a soft skin drum with a padded stick. Some of the women jumped up and formed a line, and a man with a white handkerchief, as we'd seen at Stoichev's, led them around the meadow. The people too old and infirm to dance sat smiling with their terrible teeth and empty gums, or patted the ground beside them, or tapped their canes.
"Baba Yanka and her sister stayed quietly where they were, as if their moment had not come. They waited until the flute player began to call for them, gesturing and smiling, and then until their audience joined the call, and then they feigned some reluctance, and finally they got up and went, hand in hand, to stand next to the musicians. Everyone fell quiet, and the gaida played a little introduction. The two old women began to sing, their arms twined around each other's waists now, and the sound they made - a stomach-churning harmony, harsh and beautiful - seemed to come from one body. The sound of the gaida grew up around it, and then the three voices, the voices of the two women and the goat, rose together and spread over us like the groaning of the earth itself. Helen's eyes were suddenly suffused with tears, which was so unlike her that I put my arm around her in front of everyone. "After the women had sung five or six songs, with cheers in between from the crowd, everyone rose - at what signal, I couldn't tell, until I saw the priest approaching again. He carried the icon of Sveti Petko, now draped in red velvet, and behind him came two boys, each dressed in a dark robe and each carrying an icon completely covered in white silk. This procession made its way around to the other side of the church, the musicians walking behind it playing a somber melody, and halted between the church and the great fire ring. The fire had burned down completely now; only a circle of coals remained, infernally red and deep. Wisps of smoke rose up from it now and then as if something underneath were alive and breathing. The priest and his helpers stood by the church wall, holding their treasures in front of them. "At last the musicians struck up a new tune - lively but somber at the same time, I thought - and one by one the villagers who could dance, or at least walk, fell into a long snaking line that made its way slowly around the fire. As the line wound around in front of the church, Baba Yanka and another woman  - not her sister, this time, but an even more weather-beaten woman whose clouded eyes looked nearly blind - came forward and bowed to the priest and to the icons. They took their shoes and socks off and set them carefully by the church steps, kissed Sveti Petko's forbidding face, and received the priest's blessing. The priest's young helpers gave an icon to each woman, pulling off the silk covers. The music surged higher; the gaida player was sweating profusely, his face scarlet, his cheeks enormous.
"Next Baba Yanka and the woman with the clouded eyes danced forward, never losing their step, and then, while I held myself very still, watching, they danced barefoot into the fire. Each woman held her icon up in front of her as she entered the ring; each held her head high, staring with dignity into another world. Helen's hand tightened on mine until my fingers ached. Their feet rose and fell in the coals, brushing up living sparks; once I saw Baba Yanka's striped skirt smolder at the hem. They danced through embers to that mysterious rhythm of drum and bagpipe, and each went a different direction inside the circle of the fire.
"I hadn't been able to see the icons as they'd entered the ring, but now I noted that one, in the hands of the blind woman, showed the Virgin Mary, her child on her knee, her head tilted under a heavy crown. I couldn't see the icon Baba Yanka carried until she came around the circle again. Baba Yanka's face was startling, her eyes enormous and fixed, her lips slack, her weathered skin glowing from the terrible heat. The icon she carried in her arms must have been very old, like that of the Virgin, but through its smoke stains and the wavering heat I could make out an image quite distinctly: it showed two figures facing each other in a sort of dance of their own, two creatures equally dramatic and forbidding. One was a knight in armor and red cape, and the other was a dragon with a long, looping tail."