A classic fairy story... re-worked by author and story teller Robin Herne

“Little Grandmother?” Vasilisa looked up at the monstrous sack of bones that filled the doorway of the ramshackle hut. The bulldog jaw yawned open revealing teeth like broken glass and a voice clawed up from the icy caverns of the Netherworld.

“Yes?” The half-starved child shook in the frosted air, a dead leaf unfallen. Words tumbled shivering, speaking of the hearth fire that had inexplicably extinguished, of the irate stepmother spitting threats, of the fat stepsister too free with her fists. The ogre of the woods watch the scrawny morsel, wolf eyes reflecting the light as her son rode passed on his dawn red horse. “The smell of midnight is on you, child. Hearth fire must be earned.”

Tiny Vasilisa nodded, for so her blessed mother had taught her ~ a gift for a gift.  Seeing the filth that crawled on the clothes of the woman-ogre, she offered herself as maid of all work to pay for the gift of fire. The harridan withdrew into the shack, beckoning to the child to enter and gaze upon the voluminous cauldron that hung over the central fire-pit.

Vasilisa’s eyes widened, and at once she fled the house to run its full circuit before coming back to the door. The legends of Baba Yaga’s sorcery scarcely did justice to the power that could make two dozen chambers fit inside a mere hut.  All the light and into the dark the girl scrubbed, swept, chopped, stacked, cooked, and served. Yet slavery she was used to, at the beck of her stepfamily, and this monstrous forest witch never once beat her. When the work was done and the whole wild boar stewed in the cauldron, the corpse-skinned crone dolloped a soldier’s portion into a bowl for the girl, before gulping and slavering her way to the iron bottom.

Vasilisa slept with a full stomach and an unbruised skin for the first time since her father’s remarriage. A week rolled past battling encrusted filth. Crawling, skittering things in gloomy corners ceased to bother the girl; murmuring mushrooms that grew inside the house no longer alarmed; even the vast taloned legs that grew from the base of the hut and would occasionally stand and stretch no longer terrified her. Come the noon hour when Baba Yaga told her she had earned her hot coals with which to restore her home fires, poor Vasilisa’s heart sank. The madness of the witch seemed preferable to the indifference of her family.

The hag plucked a human skull from a shelf, filled it with hot embers, and scooped the child into her apron. Through the garden of nightshade and mandragora they went, to a pestle and mortar big enough to grind whalebones. In they clambered and across the land Baba paddled in the sailless ship. At last Vasilisa’s old house came in sight, and the mortar stopped with a tile-loosening thud. The termagant deposited the tiny passenger and glowered at the cowering family that peered through the curtains, before vanishing back into the icy forests.

“You live?” the stepmother muttered in disappointment. “We rekindled the hearth without you. What need have I of skulls and superstition?” The question was not to be answered, for even as Vasilisa and her father looked on, such ferocious heat radiated from the bone that they had no need of a hearth fire ever again, nor had the sour-faced stepmother or her well-larded daughter need of a funeral pyre.

 

Robin Herne's collection of largely historical murder mysteries - A Dangerous Place - is published by Moon Books. This particular story does not feature in it.

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