Kammennaia Baba

It was the year 1801 when I got the throne. My country had just celebrated the passing of an old millennium and the coming of a new one with the hope that it would be just as good as the last, when shortly after the king, my father, was heartlessly assassinated. Several days later, I was coronated as the new king of Russia.

My father and I had never gotten on; he was a very traditional ruler and never did anything new. I, however, couldn’t wait to break some old traditions. Because of this, my father had put specifically in his will that if I were to rule I must have several advisors which my father had hand-picked.

These advisors were a group of small, haggard men who looked as though they were monkeys of the devil more than angels of god. They moved, hunched over and shuffling, a permanent scowl drawn on their cold-hearted faces.

As king I had to attend several services and I had to give my gifts to the Gods. It was at one of these services I met Aglaya, which in Russian literally means beauty and splendour, which she definitely met the standards for - she was more beautiful than Aphrodite herself. We talked for a long while and found ourselves falling deeper and deeper in love. She became my world and my universe, I couldn’t live without her. She became the biggest part of my life. We got married a few months after we met and started a blissful journey together.

For a few years life went on as normal; the vulture-like advisors listened less and less and ruled the country more and more. I was only a figurehead and everyone knew it, my say never mattered, everyone was too afraid of change. Eventually I had had enough. I got no say in how my country was run and I hadn’t changed a thing in the three years I was ruling. So I decided to abdicate. My wife and I announced our plans to the advisors with it all thought-out, but we were stupid to have even the slightest bit of hope. Obviously they wouldn’t let us off the hook that easily but they had a valid point: we had no heir and no younger brother or sister to hand the throne to. Thus, I was not able to abdicate. 

A few months later, Aglaya was pregnant. It was quite sudden, but it had to be and it felt like fate. Then, as if they knew we were happy for the first time in ages, the advisors decided to tell us about an old tradition that applied to all the first children of the kings and queens. The tradition was this: 

‘If the first child of the king and queen is a devil girl, she must be encased in a stone statue called a Kammennaia Baba, suffocating her, then thrown into a river as an offering to the Goddess Aditi, who will purify her and try to bless you with a boy.’

We were sickened that such a tradition still existed and I tried and tried to get the advisors to change it, but they said no such thing would be possible. Finally, when our baby was born we were devastated to hear it was a healthy, gorgeous girl. We decided to call her дорогой.

‘I cannot bear it, I cannot give her up. Especially not for some stupid tradition,’ Aglaya lamented as she cradled her newborn daughter. I didn’t reply. I had nothing to say. Nothing could make it right. ‘They expect us to just give her up like a lamb to the slaughter?’ She shouted, I could see she was looking for me to say something so I just said, ‘Well, what can we do?’ I wasn’t sure whether I wanted an answer but she gave me one anyway. ‘We should just go.’ She said almost to herself. I gave a small sigh and sat down next to her. ‘I’m being serious.’ She said intensely as she jolted up. ‘There is no way we can stay here and keep our dear little дорогой. So let’s just go, tell no one, go far away and never come back!’ We decided to do it.

It seemed like just minutes before we were leaving to get general groceries we would need for our travels. Normally someone else would do it for us but we didn’t know who to trust now. We had all our bags and clothes ready to get back home, get our incomparable daughter whom we had left at home, and leave. We were halfway into town when we saw one of my advisors across the street, he looked right at us. He must have known our plans - only an idiot wouldn’t have guessed from all our bags. He started running. He was running towards our house. I dropped everything and ran home, with only the faint sound of Aglaya shouting in the background. But when I got home it was too late. He had already taken our child.

By the time I had searched the whole house, the little hope I had fading with each room I went in, Aglaya was back. She was devastated, her clothes drowning in tears. I couldn’t abide to see her like that so I charged to the one place I knew they would be. The temple to Goddess Aditi is beautiful; it truly is a place that steals your breath away. It has a shimmering, crystal clear river running through it but the special thing about this river is that it is thousands and millions of miles deep, you wouldn’t get a third of the way before you drowned. This is the river my daughter would be drowned in.

There in the middle of the temple was half of a stone figure of a child’s body, inside, my darling daughter, unaware of the horror that awaited. As they lowered the heavy other half of the statue over дорогой I ran her with no plan of what to do next, but I only reached her in time to lock eyes with her for the last time as the stone was laid down. It made me happier to know that I was the last person she saw but all I could think was how she was now slowly suffocating with no chance of survival as they lowered her into the river, into an eternity of darkness. With this I collapsed, with no control of my emotions, I didn’t know how to feel. I was angry, miserable and shocked that something as small as her, who was only in my life for a few days, could mean more to me than anything. I trudged home, planning how I would tell Aglaya but she must have guessed because when I walked through my doors I came upon wife’s legs gently swaying, dangling motionless in the air, pale and cold. 

by Izzy Bowen-Lowe