The Flight of the Palace Women

Young Irannika learned that after a short few days when she felt an intense sense of novelty about the outside, the mysterious place of wonder which she had been told the most horrible things about, to keep her in, that the novelty had worn off — that each place had begun to look very similar to the last, even though Hutanonoyong always seemed confident telling apart one place from the other. She envied the elder woman, who was an expert in making herself at home, and to make Irannika her guest. How far has it been, since Irannika, in her palace, her courtesans, and her shimmering jewelery, was the host, and Olivia Hutanonoyong her humble serf?

It was said of the fabled country of Finland, far to the west, even more so than Archangel, where it was said was as far as you can reach before falling off the edge of the world, to the Void, to Hades, or to America, whichever the case might be — that it was called the land of a thousand lakes, that the lake Saimaa snaked across the landscape and made it more water than land, so that the city of Savonlinna, with no space left to expand, was forced to be built across it, and such a thing was heard of nowhere else in the ancient world. Here in Taimiria, from Toyogarovsk to the big lake in the north, the two passed gullies and spotted lakes, small enough to be called puddles but so numerous as to be mind-numbing, that at times Irannika suspected that they only keep going back to the same place, all over and over again.

The serf Hutanonoyong sensed her disengagement, and decided to change her approach. If she still had an inclination to shield the princess from the surrounding universe, she made sure to get rid of it. The flight of the palace women slowly developed into a trot, then a stroll, so that in a sea of undifferentiated green trees and shrubs details begin to spring to life before Irannika's eyes, a myriad of details, each with its own name.

A stream bursts its banks in a gully after a night of heavy rain, and the serf points at it, and spake thus: tashkin

A mother-fox crosses their path, and nearby a den of her young: chirigani

A hare which was spotted swimming across a swamp, which the women caught and ate, after much difficulty: tavshan

And Irannika beamed, because the Aunt had loved to entertain her with stories of the patron saint of pranksters, Tavshantachi, Brother Rabbit, whose adventures with Bear and Fox she enjoyed to no end. "It's just a pity now we have to eat him," Olivia said to her. Fortunately, he tasted good.

A bright, open meadow was the first place where Irannika saw her first olmanat. Irannika was raptured and assaulted with a jumble of emotions upon encountering the apple under the tree. Was this not what Jaromil had said to woo her with: that her face was as bright and supple as an apple? Such was a customary gift of compliment, a venerable tradition of genteel folk, but the girl had not stopped to think or wonder about what an olmanat actually looked like, found in the wild, whole and unpeeled!

She held it in her hand, perusing it intensely. As she pondered her marriage she began to look a little forlorn, as the apple stared, facelessly and innocently, back at her. After a while which seemed a little too long to Olivia, the princess budged at last, and solemnly took a bite out of OLMANAT, with the firm conviction that she was eating, in some way, a part of her own identity. And she wondered, as the aroma and the sourness began to hit her senses, if all these were just something else about herself, that she had not yet discovered?

Oh, wonderful thing, that you exist; that I feel you and taste you: that you are not only an idea carried to me upon the words of men!

And it came the dream of young Irannika, the image of a gully, like the ones they have passed innumerable times during their journey. Down by the creek a wheelchair lay on its side, abandoned, like the one that Aunt used, when she was dying of cancer. As in the nature of dreams, one sees with their mind's eye an image, and an entire lore stretches out behind it, plain and self-evident: Lady Ershebet fell into the gully, on her way to expire in Amatodate, whereupon the waters of the creek washed over her, and she was no longer dying, but had five years added to her life. After she came to she was amazed how well it fit in with her Aunt's actual story, and went on her way to the monastery with renewed vigour, following in her servant's lead.

Doan Brook, April 16, 2020

References

The Essential Chesterton, David W. Fagerberg, 2000

Br'er Rabbit, traditional Akan/Southern U.S. folk takes in various compilations

Trips with friends to Lohja and Nuuksio, Summer 2012
Map of Savonlinna