Tanya Grotter and the Throne of the Ancient One

They poured out into the courtyard just in time. The first cabin was already marching onto the drawbridge. The guard cyclops Dumpling Maker saluted it, placing a huge hand against a protruded ear.

The cabin moved with a quick march step, throwing the pimply chicken legs out far. A moss-grown hag with one tooth in her mouth and bushy eyebrows looked out of its window. The straw roof of the cabin, similar to a mop of wheaten hair, bounced. Sparks fell from the chimney.

Slander Slanderych winced and attempted to send the genie Abdullah for the reference book on fire prevention. “Go yourself, worthless! Don’t load the snowy donkey of my patience with granite blocks of your mistrustfulness!” the quarrelsome genie began to roar. He was upset with the principal for not allowing him to read solemnly to the guests his Poem of a Thousand Curses. After hearing that a snowy donkey served as the genie’s patience, Slander was so puzzled that he gave up and went unnoticeably away to the side.

Following the first cabin, its friends were already rumbling on the drawbridge. Dumpling Maker was standing so still, chest out, eyes staring, with a hand exactly stuck to one ear. Miraculous bliss did not disappear from his face even when one of the cabins, making room for a neighbour, carelessly bumped him into the ditch. I’ll not understand vhere ze natural Greek gets such sergeant-major zeal from! Russia treats all alike!” Professor Stinktopp muttered disapprovingly.

In total the participants in the prospective races were seven Russian cabins, two Ukrainian huts, three Northern yurts on deer hooves, and the highlight – High-rise on Broiler Legs. The latter was so enormous that it was necessary to enlarge the gates with a special spell. When finally it managed with improbable efforts to squeeze through into the internal courtyard of Tibidox, it began to seem from the outside that an additional tower had appeared in the school of difficult-to-raise magicians.

“Perhaps we’ll persuade it to stay?” the academician Sardanapal asked.

“No way! I’ve heard about it! It has such a temper that it’ll start to kick all of them here. It spends its entire life on foreign tours for this very reason… Hey, Tararakh! Take the children to the side! Don’t get any closer!” Medusa began to worry. The students unwillingly moved aside.

Worked up by the long passage, the cabins still trampled for a while in the courtyard before they agreed to move up to the previously marked areas. The distance between the areas was measured such that one cabin could not kick another. Here they stood, occasionally creaking from time to time and shifting from foot to foot.

Yagge walked between the cabins and cordially greeted their mistresses. It was obvious from everything that Yagge had been acquainted with the majority of them already for about seven hundred years, no less…

“Granny also had such a cabin once. Someone chased it away. Granny went for slippery jacks – returned, and tsk-tsk! Really, there’re such snakes!” Bab-Yagun informed Vanka.

“What, so she didn’t find it?” Kuzya Tuzikov asked, putting his tousled head between the friends.

“Shutters repainted, door hung somewhere else – you just try to find it! Get away from here, reactive broom! Nothing to smile about!” Yagun frowned. He wanted awfully to send an itch or the chicken evil eye to the insincerely sympathizing Tuzikov, but had to keep himself under control. Slander was spinning around hereabout, and Yagun had only recently been transferred back to the white department. Sardanapal did this after yielding to Yagge’s requests, and, as he expressed it, “until the first prank.”

“Yagge, old lady! How are you? Still squeaking so-so?” suddenly someone shrilly shouted behind their backs.

“Solonina Andreevna! It’s been donkey’s years!” Yagge – not very willingly, as it seemed to Tanya – embraced and kissed the middle-aged emaciated red-haired witch. Ginger was almost a beauty, but a gigantic saucer-sized pink beauty spot on her cheek slightly spoiled her looks. Solonina Andreevna’s cabin was lean and long-legged. It had a unique roof covered in green tiles and Venetian blinds instead of curtains and geraniums decorated the windows. Moving away, Yagge several times glanced back at Solonina Andreevna, who was smiling so broadly with feigned happiness.

Sardanapal and Medusa, until then admiring from the little balcony the idyllic scene of the chicken-legged, had already come down into the courtyard.

“How do you do, kind hostesses! How do you do, witch-grannies!” the academician affectionately greeted all.

“And good health to you, host! Oh, come, how the beard was neglected! Exactly Tsar Gorokh!” the old ladies answered not in unison. Sardanapal’s smile widened.

“Oh, I see, everybody is here! Lukerya-Feathers-on-the-Head! Glashka-Curdled-Milk! Big Matrena! Small Matrena! Aza Camphorovna, my respects!”

The witch-grannies began vying with each other to shower Sardanapal and Medusa with presents of bunches of mushrooms and kegs of pickles and sauerkraut. The Northern witch-grannies brought cartilaginous fish and smoked deer ribs. Solonina Andreevna presented a monograph of her own composition, entitled The role of a gossip in the informational field of a planet. Cultural-logical aspect. The Ukrainian ladies presented lard and a bottle of vodka, which Medusa immediately removed far from the eyes of the academician. The witch-grannies smiled with understanding. Inspired by the successes of his rival, Professor Stinktopp rashly wanted to butt in for gifts, but they gave him nothing except a dead crow and a hissing black cat. Whimsical witch-grannies did not award black magicians.

When the instructors, students, and guests left for the Hall of Two Elements for the holiday dinner, the drawbridge again started to move like a piston and Dubynya, Usynya, and Gorynya tumbled into the courtyard. In recent months, they had been assigned to guard the coast far from Tibidox. There the hero-bouncers rarely caught the eyes of the instructors and were thoroughly out of control. They built a home-brew apparatus and now and then, bored without shashlik, secretly brought down a deer in the forbidden forest. In time, the mischief of the heroes reached such a degree that Sardanapal, stepping out on the wall, sniffed the wind and could not understand why it smelled like booze.

Dubynya, Gorynya, and Usynya knew nothing about the cabin races and now they were rather puzzled, after discovering that the entire enclosed courtyard was jammed with chicken-legged little houses. “What chicken coop did they set up here?” Gorynya said. “Right away I’ll crow like a rooster!” Usynya stated. Dubynya also wanted to say something witty, but, as it regularly happened with him, again experienced a crisis of genre. So, not thinking up anything, he carried the club over his head and advanced forward.

Clucking worriedly, the cabins darted to the sides, dropping bundles of straw from the roofs. A yurt on deer hooves hid behind a Ukrainian hut. Only High-rise on Broiler Legs remained in place.

Inspired by the easy victory, Dubynya moved towards it. “Why did you stand here, lanky? Now stomp!” he raised his voice at it and struck its leg with the club. High-rise on Broiler Legs shouted cockily and swung the hurt leg. The kick turned out first rate: Dubynya, flying away with the speed of a cannonball, was visible from a distance – from all the windows and towers. The trajectory of his flight was excellent and corresponded to all moronoid laws of physics. After tracing a gigantic arc and admiring the Buyan Island from the height of a hero’s flight, the projectile named Dubynya landed somewhere in the region of the coastal cliffs.

Gorynya and Usynya, thinking of cajoling High-rise with their clubs, stopped. “Listen, brother, what was I thinking? Must first go look for Dubynya,” Gorynya, scratching his forehead, said. “But you, high-rise brooding hen, don’t be glad! You would think it has a brain! We’ll return yet!” Usynya added, and both heroes, pulling their heads into their shoulders, stepped back into the forest.

The small-minded cabins, with chicken happiness surrounded High-rise, clucking with the liveliness of an experienced brooding hen…

* * *

At the end of the solemn dinner, smoothly turning into a not less solemn supper, Tararakh, bashfully picking his teeth with a knife, approached Tanya. “Tanya, we need to have a talk! Let’s go away to the stairs!” the pithecanthropus said. Vanka Valyalkin with offence turned away. Earlier Tararakh did not have secrets from him.

“Oho, what secrets we have! Maybe Tararakh’s planning a revolution in Tibidox?” Bab-Yagun mockingly whispered to him. Vanka nearly flung a plate at him. “Okay, don’t be offended! What kind of intrigues can Tararakh come up with? He’s a pithecanthropus! What intrigues could there be in the Stone Age? A club on the head – that’s the entire cave revolution,” comforting him, added Yagun.

Tanya and Tararakh went away to the stairs of the Atlases. Here only the Atlases could overhear them, but they were interested in nothing except their primary occupation. “I have a request for you… Only keep it from everyone! Agree?” Tararakh continued.

“Agree,” said Tanya. She shifted from foot to foot, waiting until it would be possible to return to the puff pastry. After several weeks with the radish tablecloth, she needed something less nourishing and useful. For example, a rich pastry with cream and the complete absence of vitamins.

“Are you getting ready for exams?” Tararakh asked.

“Yes, kind of,” Tanya pronounced not very confidently, involuntarily thinking whether she spoke the truth. On one hand, together with Yagun and Vanka, she still had not yet touched the textbooks. On the other hand, they had already tried for a week to hatch from malachite a spirit of omniscience, watering it with dragon tears and keeping it in the cold. The spirit actually hatched, but every time such an idiot came out that not only was it incapable of prompting, but it also did not even remember its own name.

“Look, Tanya, you study well… So that it would just fly out of your mouth! So that any second, even when you wake up at night, everything would still be in your head… Of course, it’s also possible to spark on a grand scale without knowledge. Here it’s not even necessary to be a professor, but simply to be smart. For another professor, work so piles up that only the nose remains to be seen…” Suddenly noticing that he was refuting himself, Tararakh became silent and bashfully wiggled his toes. He always walked around barefoot, asserting that in shoes he felt like a rhinoceros with prostheses.

“There’s something about all this I don’t like. He started talking about studies… What if all his asps crawled away again and there’s no one to gather them?” Tanya cautiously thought.

Taking heart, the pithecanthropus took a deep breath, breathed out with such force as if blowing out a candle burning somewhere at the other end of the hall, and approached the essence, “Tanya, tonight I want to go to the cabins. I’m interested in seeing how they’re doing there. Building a nest or, perhaps, sleeping while standing.”

“Go. Why not?” Tanya said.

“Also – what if I’m lucky and some cabin lays an egg. I would put it into the bird Sirin’s nest – it could hatch me a cabin. And I could then give it to Yagge as a present…” Tararakh continued to mutter.

“Wonderful. Yagge would be pleased.” For the time being Tanya did not see what the secret here was. Perhaps Tararakh was afraid that she would let out the secret to Yagun, and he – to his granny, and then it would not be a surprise.

“Wow-wow! And I say: wonderful!” Tararakh was inspired. “So, it means, you agree? You will sit with the Sleeping Adonis?”

“With whom, with whom?” Tanya asked him to repeat.

Tararakh brought a finger to his lips, “Shush! Later you’ll find out. Only consider: you have to sit the whole night. Otherwise it won’t work.”

“But who is this Sleeping Adonis?”

“Later you’ll find out. I can’t tell you for the time being. So, yes or no? I haven’t asked you to do anything for a long time.”

“Well, okay,” yielded Tanya.

“It means yes?” the pithecanthropus asked again with distrust.

“Yes, yes, yes, yes!” Tanya despondently repeated. She already reckoned that it would be possible to take a puff pastry with her. Moreover, a sleeping adonis is rarely seen. It would be interesting to take a look. Even if the adonis suddenly woke up and was annoyed, it was always possible to push him to Verka Parroteva or Coffinia.

Tararakh beamed. “I knew that you’d agree! You won’t be sorry!” he blurted out, “My den in ten minutes then! Knock this way: one-two-three, one-two… Only remember – not a word!”

Tanya returned to the table. Bab-Yagun and Vanka with curiosity looked sideways at her but asked nothing. “I have to be absent… I cannot tell you anything because… Well, in short, we’ll meet after breakfast!” she said, confused. “Uh-huh,” Vanka indifferently turned away. Tanya, knowing him very well, understood that he was downright outraged.

She was guiltily at a loss, wrapped a large piece of puff pastry in a napkin and slipped from the Hall of Two Elements. Having gotten up along the stairs of the Atlases, she turned into the first dark corridor. This was not the shortest way to Tararakh’s den; however, the girl hoped that precisely here she would meet no one. The torches hissed in an unfriendly manner and poured out sparks. Wheelchair’s loose spokes jingled somewhere in the nooks. Tanya, without stopping, threw a briskus at it.

She was already halfway to Tararakh’s den when suddenly a dark silhouette floated out from a niche, barring her way. Tanya squealed. Two torches went out with her screech. Somewhere above a glass cracked. Indeed if anything, the baby Grotter knew how to squeal and did this skilfully. Pipa gave her the lessons. Here, in Tibidox, she improved her technique with Katya Lotkova and Verka Parroteva – two famous panic-mongers. The figure started back and, after plugging up his ears with his hands, issued a bird cry. Simultaneously his face came into a lunar ray pouring through a stained-glass panel like a bluish stream. Tanya recognized Slander Slanderych.

The colorless eyes of the principal froze the girl from her head to her heels. It seemed to Tanya that an icy lump began to form in her stomach. Prickly sparks ran through her body. “Grotter, immediately shut your mouth! You stunned me! What are you doing here?” the principal hissed.

“I’m going for a walk!”

Slander grinned distrustfully. “Here? What, no more suitable places for a walk?”

“There are,” mechanically answered Tanya.

“Then what are you doing here?” the principal squinted.

“Eh-eh… Everywhere is full of people. And here no one prevents me from concentrating. I’m thinking over a composition on the theme of The Use of Rancid Jellyfish for Magic Purposes! You can ask Professor Stinktopp. He assigned it to us!” Tanya said, in a hurry groping for the first explanation she chanced upon.

“Fine, I’ll definitely ask Stinktopp whether he permits you to be loose along the corridors,” Slander promised with a threat. His eyes like sticky worms crawled along Tanya’s arms and stopped at the napkin. “So. A bundle. What’s in it?”

“Pastry,” Tanya was lost.

“Really? Hand it over!” the principal demanded. Then Slander Slanderych behaved unpredictably. He threw the bundle onto the floor, hung over it like a hawk, and began to hack the pastry to pieces, not paying attention to the cream and the jam smearing his fingers. At the same time, he contrived to keep his magic ring in readiness in order to throw a combat spark if necessary. Finally, the pastry was destroyed and even trampled by his feet. On the floor remained only an ugly mash on which wasps began to congregate. One of them even stung the principal’s finger. For some reason this calmed Slander down. “Wasps cannot be mistaken. This was truly pastry…” he said to himself quietly. “Okay, Grotter, go! Only don’t think that I believed you! You still have to give an explanation, and very soon!” He bored Tanya with his view one more time, and again withdrew into the niche.

Tanya had time to notice a little folding there, created with the help of the simplest magic. “Aha, Slander sits in ambush! Interesting, who is he on watch for? And my pastry is something he did not like!” she thought.

Soon, after contriving not to bump into anyone anymore, Tanya stood at the door of Tararakh’s room, trying to recall the prearranged knock. But she did not have time to knock, as the door was thrown open and the pithecanthropus literally dragged her inside by the sleeve. Likely the impatient Tararakh was on duty at the door, peeping through a crack. He put his head out into the corridor and, after looking at both sides, locked the door.

Tanya looked around with curiosity. Not without reason Tararakh called his room a den. To call it something else was somehow difficult. Soot covered the walls with the exception of those places where the pithecanthropus scratched with a stone the silhouettes of deer and aurochs. Piled up in the corner was a not bad collection of spears, knotty clubs, and rock axes. There were especially many axes. Tararakh hewed them into shape in the long winter evenings, remembering the times in the caves. A fireplace was laid out in stones in the middle of the den, leaves and dry grass lay next to it by armfuls. Tararakh slept on them, asserting that it was much more comfortable this way. “Still!” he said with pride. “The bed must be repaired, linen cleaned, so once a year I throw the straw into the fire, and I’m able to gather new leaves from there!”

“Did anyone see you?” Tararakh asked anxiously.

“I did. Stumbled upon Slander. He was hiding in wait for someone,” acknowledged Tanya.

The pithecanthropus dropped the log, which he was going to toss into the fire. “Where was this? Far from here?” he asked seemingly casually.

“Ne-a, not very. You know, between the stairs of the Atlases and the Tower of Ghosts there is a little curved corridor where the torches always go out.”

“Ah, understandable!” Tararakh said. It seemed to Tanya that he feared to hear something else and was now at ease.

“And he even crumbled and trampled my pastry. Do you know why? His brain all tied up in a knot perhaps?” she was interested.

Tanya thought that Tararakh would be surprised or at least agitated by the action of the principal, but this for some reason did not occur. The pithecanthropus listened to the information about the pastry without any special interest. He only muttered, “Pastry… Oh! Slander left something. This in no way can be pastry, although who knows him, what it’ll turn out to be…”

“What are you about talking? What is this?” Tanya quickly asked.

“I cannot tell you. Honestly speaking, I know little myself. Still, there are some guesses…” Tararakh answered evasively.

The pithecanthropus approached the curtain dividing his den into two halves. He already undertook to draw it aside, but suddenly took his hand away and turned to Tanya. “I can’t. This isn’t a joke! You must take a terrible oath that you’ll be silent as the grave! Understand?”

“Do you have in mind the fatal oath?” Tanya asked with trembling in her voice. Tararakh sternly nodded. Tanya felt dryness in her mouth. To her, as to everybody in Tibidox, it was well known what the fatal oath was. A magician, uttering the fatal oath of his free will or under coercion, can no longer destroy it under any conditions. Even a random disturbance of the oath – for example, if, not keeping himself under control, he tells the secret to his closest friend – entails an agonizing and terrible death.

“Are you ready?” Tararakh asked.

“I swear that I will never describe to anyone or under any condition what I will see now! No one will find out from me about the Sleeping Adonis! Strike thunderus!” Tanya blurted out. The green spark, tearing away from her ring, hung in the middle of the room, after changing for a moment into the likeness of lightning. Precisely the same lightning would pierce Tanya if she decided to make a slip of the tongue.

“Sorry it was necessary to demand the oath from you… But I think you will soon understand everything yourself. Be introduced: here is the Sleeping Adonis!” Tararakh said, decisively parting the curtain.

Tanya involuntarily recoiled. A crystal coffin was swinging on silver chains behind the curtain. The girl irresolutely approached, looked at the Sleeping Adonis, and in her heart confined the worm of disappointment. She must acknowledge that she expected to see something else. In the crystal coffin, breathing heavily with hands under a cheek, was a short-legged man with such porous cheeks that they were the right size for planting flowers. A drying carnation doubled over pitifully in the buttonhole of his white dress coat.

“Phew, how terrible! What’s in his family tree? Crocodiles?” Tanya asked.

Tararakh merrily evaded the question. “What do you want? They did not find him in time; here he was also a little dusted! But then this is the real Ludwig Champignon! Somewhere here even his uniform was signed. It was mandatory that they marked all Sleeping Adnoises in the Middle Ages… Wait!” Tararakh fussily began to inspect the collar and showed Tanya the nametag. “Here you see! What I did say? Ludwig Champignon!” the pithecanthropus was pleased. Tanya did not begin to disappoint him, although it was clearly “Gottfried Bouillon” on the nametag. She had long since known from Vanka that the pithecanthropus read and wrote rather poorly.

Tanya looked at Tararakh, and her suspicion suddenly started to nag like a dental drill. “Know what, Tararakh… I’ll sit with him, but I won’t kiss him! If you need this, indeed better call Coffinia. She would even kiss a frog. And if it’s necessary to squeeze and tickle – it’s Dusya Dollova,” she stated.

Tararakh was even frightened. “You… What thought is that? The reason I asked you to sit with him is that I was certain: you will not begin to kiss him. Or else, he, for all I know, will wake up! All these Sleeping Adonises are a little nutsy. He’ll roam and annoy everyone. And then may even be violent. Yes, in general he’s somewhat…kind of strange. I don’t entirely like it.”

“Listen, Tararakh! Where did you get this Gottfri…Ludwig Champignon? What’s he to you in general?”

The pithecanthropus reproachfully stared at the girl, with his entire look showing that Ludwig Champignon was not particularly necessary to him. Even more, he would be glad to be done with him, but could not in view of specific circumstances.

“You have to understand, here’s some business… It’s a personal request of Sardanapal. I could not refuse. The academician found him in a cave on the coast approximately one month ago. Earlier the entrance into the cave was covered with sand, and here a storm washed away the sand. Sardanapal saw a crack, squeezed in, and looked: he was in the cave, before him a coffin on chains, and an inscription carved on the cliff above the coffin. I was not so good with reading and writing, but from the words of Sardanapal the meaning was this: ‘Caution! Deferred curse! The year he is taken away will be the year of terrible ordeal for all of Tibidox!’ Now do you understand why I made you take the oath? The discussion deals with the fate of the entire Tibidox!”

Tararakh scratched his stubbly cheek with his short fingers and with annoyance pushed the crystal coffin, swaying on the chains. “Medieval magicians loved to play dirty tricks on descendants. Some even contrived to invoke a pile of deferred curses hastily and quickly died in order that they could not be abolished,” he complained.

“Wait! Really, when they’re alive, then…” Tanya started in amazement.

“Aha. What, didn’t you know?” the pithecanthropus interrupted her. “While a magician is still of this world his curse can always be annulled, although sometimes it’s even necessary to wreck your brain, but when he’s dead – now that’s it indeed. How he cursed – so it is. Earlier you even know how it happened: let’s assume a weak magician had a stormy fight with a strong one. He’ll curse him, and quickly jump into a pond with a rock tied to his neck. Well now indeed the strong magician can disappear to nowhere – the curse can no longer be removed, even if you collapse! Later The Ancient One stopped this practice and so arranged that hence deferred curses could not be imposed. But only there’s little sense all the same: do you know how many curses are placed from previous times?” Tararakh even waved his hand, showing that there was a whole pile of such trash everywhere.