Witchlines: On The Tip Of The Needle

The second myth we have been studying for Witchlines is the Russian Baba Yaga tale, The Frog Princess. In this story the frog-wife, Vasilisa the Wise, has her frog skin destroyed by her husband, Ivan. She is then forced to return to the realm of Koshchei the Deathless. Ivan must go on a journey to find her; but what isn’t told is what happens to Vasilisa while she waits.  

On The Tip Of The Needle

Life waits on the tip of a needle.

The needle is inside an egg, the egg is inside a duck, the duck is inside a hare, the hare is inside a trunk, and the trunk is at the top of a tall oak tree.

The tree stands bare, poised between winter and a spring that does not come, at the bottom of a steep-sided valley where light barely reaches. A perpetual twilight cloaks the place with dimness, broken only by the pale glow of swan feathers shed at my feet. My woman-skin is all I have now, and I am cold, shivering in the damp, stale air.

A sliver of moon, neither waxing nor waning, pierces the sky, a sharp piece of bone; and I hear the rattle of Koshchei’s bones as he stalks about his realm, as naked and spindly as the old oak.

There is no movement, no breeze, only stillness. The day seems to be ending—always ending—falling towards a longed-for night, yet the stars never appear to whirl as they should. The world remains colourless, silent, grieving for the lost certainty of darkness and light. Icy water seeps up through the sodden ground to numb my feet, and exhale its reek of rot, its stench of stagnancy. My mouth is dry, but I cannot drink this foul fluid, for near me is a shallow pool filled with frogspawn on the verge of decomposing, a becoming that will not be. Beside my unrealised children, my dormant dreams, I sit and brood on my fate, holding the memory of warmth within, the memory of wings, of clean water, of life and growth and never-ending change.

With the tip of a feather, I trace meandering lines on the muddy ground. Lines that turn this way and that, swirling inwards and outwards, always moving, always journeying, seeking and finding. Lines that tell of life, and the Mystery, and the insides of bodies—mine, Her’s, earth’s. 

Koshchei the Deathless is near, and he is always hungry. I hear him gnawing on the bones of his own gaunt body, scraping at the lifeless ground with his fingernails, looking for any trace of sustenance. He moans and cries out a lament, which echoes through the valley, the song of a sad ghost, a decaying god. I pity him as much as I fear him, but I know he must die. 

As he howls, my meandering line moves towards one of the oak’s twisted roots, and that is when I see it: the rotting wood, the bark falling away, the beetles and fungi that are eating out its heart, bringing blessed death. 

The tree will fall. 

I know then that the oak is Her body, withering, turning inwards, descending back into the renewing earth. It is Her body, crowned with the magic vessel, containing hare, duck, egg, and needle—the needle that stitches the world together, threading it with lines of fate, tipped with the prick of life in death. And when Koshchei succumbs—as all life must—when he finally lets go of his impossible immortality, it is Her body to which She will draw him, back into Her embrace, into life, to suckle hungrily at Her abundant breasts. 

Postcard by Matorin Nickolay Vasilyevich (Source: Wikimedia)