ANNA OPENED THE door of the small cottage to find four neat stacks of coins on the stoop glinting in the last rays of the summer sun. She shut the door and pressed her back against it. Her blood ran cold.
There was a tremendous rush outside like the sound of a windstorm, though the branches of the tree beyond the yellowed window did not move. Then the knock came again. There will be no hiding from this.
She took a slow, steady breath and opened the door. She could see nothing but feet, belly, and a tip of a snout. A black dragon drummed long charcoal talons on her wooden step, its scaly lips parted over inky teeth. It emitted a growl with a tone that could only be described as “satisfaction”.
Anna kept her head upright and her eyes forward though her legs were shaking. The dragon dissolved into a puff of dark smoke that skidded around her skirt and into the small cottage. In front of the hearth it re-formed, as a cockerel, ebony from the top of its comb to the tip of its claws, save for five long tail feathers of flame. There was a burst of fire to her side as the money materialized on the table.
The creature paced along the back wall, light from its plumes making shadows dance across the floor. It brushed its tail over the hearth, lighting a pile of neatly stacked logs.
“Good evening, Anna,” it said. The beak did not move, the deep voice emanated from every wall.
Anna swallowed. “Aitvaras, you have returned.”
“I have. And, in honour of our new home, I have brought you a gift.”
Anna inched towards the table. Two stacks of gold chervonetz, another two of silver roubles all on top of two ten-chervonetz notes. More cash than she’d seen in one place in five years, perhaps even in her life.
“Where did you get it?”
“That does not matter; it is yours now.”
She shook her head. “We’ve been bartering for everything for a year. Adomas had to save for weeks just to scrape up enough money for his ticket to Kaunas. And what would I do with this?” She turned a coin over in her hand. “Waltz into the village and hand over a gold chervonetz to buy a cow? Wouldn’t that seem strange? But that’s the point, isn’t it?”
The aitvaras cocked its head.
Anna scooped up the money in one swift motion, opened the front door and tossed it out. “Well, I don’t want it.”
With another puff, the money re-appeared on the table.
“And yet, it is for you and for Adomas.”
A knot wound in Anna’s stomach. Adomas had gone to Kaunas five months ago, at the risk of being discovered, to find a girl he had met in the resistance, marry her, and bring her back to this small spit of a village. Anna had stayed to hold their place and to make this shabby cottage into a home. Last week Adomas had finally sent word he’d be returning with his new wife. They were to arrive tomorrow morning on the overnight train.
Anna was also married, or, at least, she had been; the Soviets had deported him in 1940 and that was the last she’d ever heard of him. But a wife for Adomas meant life for all of them: a home, children, and perhaps even a bit of happiness. Anna’s eyes swept the meagre, one-room cottage, which she’d slaved to clean and prepare; then shifted back to the aitvaras strutting the floor. It might have been a nice home, but now it might as well be ash.
Anna grabbed her kerchief from her bedpost and knotted it behind her ears. She gathered up the money again and pushed out the door of the cottage. The aitvaras followed, its head bobbing with each step. As soon as it was beyond the threshold, it regained the form of a dragon and its footsteps shook the ground underneath her feet.
She found a spot where the earth looked soft and dug with her fingers. She was used to this. She had worked on the local collective farm in the months her brother had been gone. Tools were few and far between, so it was sticks or rocks or her own bare hands that she used to work the earth.
The aitvaras sat next to her, hot breath on the back of her neck and a wing stretched over her like a canopy. She knew it could not hurt her directly, but its presence made her mouth dry and her heart beat faster.
During her childhood, she had only seen fleeting glimpses of the aitvaras as a dragon, but as a rooster the creature had been ever-present. It had strutted the rooms of her grandfather’s farmhouse, hopping up on the furniture, pacing the mantle, peering down at her with a shiny black eye from atop the clock in the hall. Back then, she had tried to chase it—a shadow with a candle for a tail—but her mother had caught her round the waist and whispered in her ear that it was an evil thing and would burn her if she touched it.
Though she was never courageous enough to test her mother’s word, it remained a strange and almost joyful thing for her to lay eyes on. That was until the morning she woke to find her mother crying and her grandfather and father standing solemnly by her uncle’s bedroom door. Her uncle had always been a drunkard, kept mostly dry by his personal poverty. The aitvaras had granted him the gift of a whole cask of wine and he’d drank himself to death.
Later, in 1928, the entire village’s crops failed and bags of grain appeared in their pantry. Her grandfather refused to accept them even though the whole family was starving. He took the bags into the village to return them, but the rightful owner was not the type to listen to reason and stabbed him. He never made it home.
Then there was the gold watch that appeared by her eldest brother’s bedside. He had been much more cautious in trying to find the owner, but was trampled by a runaway horse and cart with the accursed thing still clutched in his hand. From then on, Anna had tried to frighten the aitvaras away when her mother wasn’t there to scold her, but to it the waving arms of a little girl were nothing.
“Why did you leave?” Anna said softly─barely loud enough to be heard over the creature’s breath and the din of cicadas. Anna couldn’t say precisely when it had left, but one night, after they were forced to leave the farmhouse and were sleeping huddled in the forest, she realized she couldn’t remember the last time she had seen it.
The rumble of satisfaction sounded again. “I have laboured at my revenge for centuries, thinning out the ranks of the descendants slowly, as is my nature. But there are times when it is quicker for me to step aside and let history take its course.”
“Ah, so it was easier to leave us to the Russians and the Germans,” she said as she dropped the money into the hole and covered it with earth. It spoke the truth; her parents and five of her brothers gone in less than five years. She rose to her feet and stamped down the spot.
Night had fallen and the only light was the fire in the cottage. Anna dusted her hands as she entered and the aitvaras skidded back to rooster form, black wingtips whispering by her legs. The dirt was still under her nails but the money was on the table, clean and neatly stacked. It was not surprising, but still her heart sank.
She sat down with a sigh and began to shred the chervonetz notes, over and over again. Each time she let them fall to the tabletop, fire lit the edges and they reassembled.
“I still don’t understand,” she said, caught up in the rhythm of tearing. “I know we’re the descendants of some warlord who once supposedly controlled half of Lithuania, or some other embellishment I’ve never benefited from. But what my mother never explained to me was why. What is it that you are taking vengeance for?”
There was a pause, the aitvaras’ shadow was long in the light of the hearth, the reflection of its tail stretching across the floor like fingers. “Long ago I brought that warlord success,” the walls said, reverberating in her chest. “And for that I was worshipped—by him, by his children and his children’s children. But then the new god came and the old were forgotten. I was called a devil and they tried to drive me from my home.”
Anna gave a short, bitter laugh. “Haven’t you heard? The Soviets are here, there are to be no gods, old or new.”
The creature didn’t answer.
“So this is because you felt slighted, is it? How pathetic. It’s been six hundred years; your revenge is too slow.”
“And yet, once you and Adomas are dead, it will be complete.”
How long do we have before this money brings fate crashing down on us? Will I talk to my brother across this table? Will he have a night to rest with his new wife in the small bed with the red blanket? Perhaps a few of my brothers deserved their fate, but not Adomas.
Anna cocked her head to the side and the rooster cocked its head along with her.
She grabbed one of the ten-chervonetz notes and half the coins, carefully creased the face of Lenin, folded up the edges of the note and wrapped them around the coins until she had a neat, secure little packet. She then repeated the process with the second note. She held one in place with a thumb against each palm and strode slowly towards the hearth.
She stared into the flames where they danced along the cracks in the logs. The heat pulled at the skin on her legs and the smoke touched her nostrils. The aitvaras paced beside her, alternating flashes of black and fire. From it, there was nothing: no heat, no scent.
Laughter came from the walls and the aitvaras shook its jet comb. “Go on then,” it said, pointing with its beak. “Throw them in. Let’s have this over with.”
“If you have brought us this gift,” Anna began softly, “it means you know there is nothing outside these walls that will kill us, at least before we bring the next generation into the world and render your revenge incomplete.”
The aitvaras flapped its wings and its tail glowed brighter.
“No matter if we are sent to the Gulag or fight for the Forest Brothers or get hit by a runaway carriage, Adomas and I will not die. Or else you would not be here. If you did not put this money on our table, in wait of the Russian you stole it from, we would live.”
Anna looked at the packets and back to the fire. Her mother’s voice rang in her head: Don’t touch it; it will burn your fingers.
She bit down on her lip so hard she drew blood. When the creature turned for another strut, Anna whirled on her heel and grabbed a hold of the fiery tail feathers with both hands.
The aitvaras screamed.
It started as a chicken’s squawk but then grew deep and powerful. The walls shook so much she feared the cottage would come down around them. Anna screamed too, but the sound was lost like a match in a wildfire. Her hands blistered and tightened, the money turning molten in her grasp.
The aitvaras ran on its rooster feet, pulling her behind it like a ragdoll around the cottage.
The pain in her hands was unbearable.
Her skin burned off in layers down to the raw nerves, hissing and popping as it went. Then, to her relief, she couldn’t feel them anymore.
She fought to gain footing on the wooden floorboards, then pulled back her shoulder with all the strength she had. Three tail feathers pulled free in her left hand and burst into sparks around her before fading into the darkness. She clung to the remaining with her right.
The aitvaras’ screams took on new vigour, changing tone as it reached the doorway and the dragon form washed over it. In an instant, Anna’s feet were above the ground as the creature took to the sky. She dangled behind it by her right hand which was fused to the two remaining feathers. Her hand floated inside the shadow of a black dragon tail unable to solidify.
The aitvaras crested in the sky. It made no attempt to shake her: it could not cause her death directly, but it cursed her liberally to the heavens.
The air was cool and growing colder; the stars bright and beautiful. Her left hand hung limply at her side; it throbbed at the unnaturally straight line where char met flesh. In the quiet she could hear the sound of it sizzling. Her fingers were black as coal, forever burned into a claw around a fistful of ash and slag.
She smiled weakly. She was shivering and there was something warm in her mouth. Far below her, the countryside stretched like a black blanket. Pinpricks of light were rare, save for a great cluster off in the distance that must be Kaunas. She saw the lights of a train snaking its way through the forest. And she saw Adomas. He was sitting at a window seat, staring into the night, a woman asleep on his shoulder. She had an honest face and hands used to work.
They were almost home.
She lifted her stiffening left arm and pushed her elbow into the leathery hide of the aitvaras. With her leverage in place, she pulled the remaining tail feathers.
She hung for a second in the summer sky above her homeland. The tail dissolved, the aitvaras screamed, and the air burst into flames and wrapped around her.
She was free.
“HEY, YOU,” NIKOLAI said, grabbing the collar of an old man they met on the village road. “My money has gone missing, do you know anything about it? Justus?”
The translator spoke with the man in Lithuanian. Nikolai could tell by the head shakes and hand gestures that the answer would be no.
Nikolai let the man go and Justus took up his conversation with the soldiers about the fireball in the sky last night. They’d talked about nothing else their whole walk from the last village to this one but Nikolai had more important matters than meteorites on his mind at the moment.
He had found nothing but frustration since he’d been sent here from the smoking rubble of Stalingrad with a medal pinned to his chest to work as a collective farm supervisor. Migration had been heavy in this area, there weren’t enough people, there weren’t enough tools, and no one spoke a word of Russian.
He had to get his money back. It was a small fortune he’d hoarded during the war in gold chervonetz, bills, and roubles, one he didn’t want to lose and one he didn’t want the higher-ups to find out about.
He grabbed a second man passing by, a younger one, both arms weighed down by carpet bags and a woman by his side.
“He says he doesn’t know a thing. He just got back into town this morning on the train,” Justus translated.
The woman searched her clothing and produced the stub of a train ticket.
“I don’t care what anyone says,” Nikolai said with a sharp chop of his hand. “I’m going to search every house in this village from top to bottom until I find it.”
Justus thought it necessary to translate this to the young couple, who shrugged.
Three men huddled together by the side of the road caught Nikolai’s eye.
“What are you doing here? Justus, ask them what they’re doing here.”
Justus raised an eyebrow as he translated their answer. “They say that one’s old rooster laid an egg.”
“Rooster? These country idiots! Did you tell them roosters don’t lay eggs?”
“I did, but they still insist.”
“Here, let me see.” He squatted in the midst of them and snatched the egg. He held it up to the sunlight. As Nikolai stared at it, he saw flames dancing below the surface. His mouth went dry, the farmers were crowded around him but he couldn’t make out a single face.
“Let’s go and start the search,” Justus said, his voice sounded far away, drowned out by the buzzing in Nikolai’s head. “We want it done quickly, huh?”
A warmth spread through his chest, Nikolai waved his arm. “Aw, don’t bother, I’m sure I just misplaced the money.” The flames leapt at the back of his eyes, more consuming than the sun. “This, I’m keeping.”