Blood Red, Snow White Read Free

Perhaps the Tsar thought it was, but didn’t realize that what he had done would lead to a very different ending indeed.
    Even in a tale with a happy ending, there may be sadness on the way. Think of Vanya and Maroosia. They are happy children, they love their grandfather, and they love their little cat and big dog. But they have no parents. Their parents died years before our story starts. What awful thing takes both parents away from their children? Maybe you don’t want to know, and maybe it doesn’t matter. But it was the Tsar who killed them.
    Not with his own hands, but just as surely, the Tsar killed their parents. He made serfs of them, made them move to work on his lands, and then worked them so hard that Father died of exhaustion and Mother died of a broken heart.

 
    ENGAGEMENT AND ESCAPE
    WAIT!
    There!
    It’s the bear again, prowling through the flawless snows, heavy and heavy and heavy, paws and claws and teeth and fur. Thick, thick fur.
    He is moving again, but as yet without purpose. Dimly he hears the commotion from the city, the gunfire and the stampeding feet, but it means nothing to him yet. He wanders through the trees as if asleep, or in a waking dream, unclear of what he is and what he will be. He is mighty, almost unbelievably powerful in fact, but like a gentle giant, he doesn’t know his own strength.
    Not yet.
    Not yet, but soon.
    The bear stumbles back to a hidden cave who knows where in the forest, to hibernate. He goes to sleep, an enchanted sleep, as in a fireside tale.
    He sleeps for twelve years.
    And for now, our story lies elsewhere.
    *   *   *
    Do you remember the stranger? The young stranger, with the suitcase in one hand and the wooden box in the other. Wearing an old soldier’s greatcoat to armor himself against the cold, he’s still walking through Russia, but he has left the forest behind him now and is approaching the city. There are many fairy tales already about him, and by the time he is an old man there will be many more, but let me tell you the story about the stranger, and Ivy.
    *   *   *
    The young man had been born, across the water, in the big open country called the Lakes, because that’s just what you find nestled between the hills and fells where he lived. He’d lived in this beautiful tough land all his childhood, and had gone to school with ugly rough boys on the shores of his favorite lake.
    One winter, when he was barely more than a toddler, his father was visited by a Russian prince, a man with the splendid name of Kropotkin. After they had concluded their business, the prince was appalled to find that the child could not ice-skate, and there and then took him out to a frozen river and guided his infant steps. It’s a fairy tale in itself. A tale with a happy ending, how, when he got to the big school by the lake, he suffered at the hands of the other boys, bigger and stronger than him. And meaner. Every day, as they fought and played their way through their school days, he’d be punished for being weak. Until the day, when, in the midst of the hardest winter in thirty years, the lake on whose shores the school stood froze over. None of the other boys had seen such ice before, and the headmaster declared that school was shut and all games should be played on the ice.
    The lake froze solid for four weeks on end. Perch were trapped like flies in aspic; they looked dead, but maybe they miraculously came back to life when the steely ice finally thawed. At last the headmaster’s obsession with sport worked in the boy’s favor. Every day the boys would stay out on the ice until dusk, when bonfires were lit on the shores to warm them through. Here, finally, was one thing he could do better than the others. For the rest of his life he remembered the relief of gliding past his tormentors floundering on their backsides while he headed off, the whole glittering world beneath his skates, thanks to Kropotkin.
    That’s a tale with a happy ending, and one