I couldn’t tell if by here she meant the ballet theater, or if she meant Oblya as a whole, the huge, gray sprawl of the city outside our garden walls. In the theater we were hemmed in by the men and women of the upper curia, as colorful as candied fruits in their silks and satins; outside in the streets we were surrounded by drunken day laborers, with their fox-lean faces and their loose, fat lips. I did not know which was worse. I raised my shoulders and sunk down in my seat. Rose was thumbing through a pamphlet, each page embossed in gold.
“They’re doing Bogatyr Ivan,” Rose said. “They must do it every night. If Papa knew that, he’d have one of his fits.”
I cringed at the thought. Bogatyr Ivan was Oblya’s most famous ballet, and it was a corrupted version of one of the stories in our father’s codex, transfigured by Rodinyan influence and otherwise eroded by time. The titular Ivan had gone from steppe warrior to saint, and his bride had gone from chieftain’s daughter to tsarevna, and any number of other small changes had turned the story into something else, something that was scarcely recognizable to me.
But it pleased the Oblyans, and, more important, the Rodinyans. These newcomers arrived waving the tsar’s banners, talking of things like land development and city planning, or else under the emblems of private companies who squeezed every drop from Oblya’s day laborers and then vanished, only to be replaced by other men, under different emblems but with the same goal of bleeding the city dry. They were the reason Oblya’s port bustled with trade from the east, and the reason why our streets were laid out as neatly as wheel spokes. I did not think much of them, except that when they came to our gate, our father instructed us to ignore them until they left.
But now the theater was packed elbow to elbow to see one Rodinyan incomer grace the stage. I peered over Rose’s shoulder at the pamphlet, searching for his name, like I might glean something important from the particular arrangement of the letters. Her finger went up and down the page, skimming his biography.
“They say he’s the youngest principal dancer in any Rodinyan ballet company, ever,” she said. “Only twenty-one. That’s so sad, isn’t it?”
“Why is it sad?”
“Because,” she said, “what do you do when you’re twenty-one and you’ve already achieved everything that most people can only dream of? You have the rest of your life in front of you, but nowhere else to go.”
I felt sorry, somehow, that I had asked.
Before I could say another word, the orchestra warbled out its opening notes and the velvet curtains parted and the whispers around me went silent, all eyes drawn toward the single light onstage, round like a rime of ice. Cellos sang languidly under the trilling of flutes and oboes.
I had never seen Bogatyr Ivan with my sisters before, so I could not anticipate the crescendos and decrescendos and when the snare drum would kick in or when the harp would add its sultry voice. With every unfamiliar beat I felt something plucking at me like a string, my bones rattling, my blood singing. I knew the vague shape of the story, but the music added something new to it, something that made it almost too big for my eyes to hold. The first ballerinas flurried across the stage, like snow drifts in their white tulle. Male dancers in red bounded after them; they were the Dragon-Tsar’s animate flames.
The ballerinas swooned dramatically. I knew from the story in Papa’s codex that they were the spirits of ice, of pure virginal frost, of Oblya’s land before the conquerors came to burn and spoil it. Black-clad, the Dragon-Tsar mimed laughing as the cellos droned gravely. I knew, too, that eventually Ivan would enter, clumsy and swordless, just a farmer’s son and a peasant until he became a warrior—and, in this version, as the pamphlet’s synopsis had told me, a saint. There were no saints in Papa’s version of the story, but there was always Ivan.
Though I had spent so many years conjuring an image of Ivan in my mind, I was not prepared to see him now: black hair streaming, chest bare where his shabby jacket parted. As soon as he was there under the lights, it was impossible to look anywhere else. It was impossible not to follow his path across the stage. In his presence, the flame-men wilted like cut roses. The snow-women stirred, silver faces brightening with nascent hope. He stumbled past them to the Dragon-Tsar; even his floundering was graceful.
The Dragon-Tsar reared, as if to strike him down, and then the pretty tsarevna danced between them, pleading with her father while Ivan retreated and the snow-women simpered. The Dragon-Tsar swept offstage with his flame-men, leaving Ivan and the tsarevna to circle each other like hesitant wolves.