The Firebird
A stolen golden apple, a feather of fire, and the youngest son who rode the longest road
Page 1
Far away in Russia there was a tsar called Berendey, and in all his kingdom the thing he loved best was his orchard. In the middle of it stood one apple tree that bore apples of solid gold — and that summer, somebody began stealing them. Every morning there were fewer, and nobody could tell how. So the Tsar set his three sons to keep watch, a night each. The eldest watched, and fell asleep. The second watched, and fell asleep. Then it was the turn of Ivan, the youngest, and he sat down with his back against the tree and did not sleep at all. At midnight the whole orchard went light as noon — and a bird came down out of the dark, a bird whose every feather burned like a coal, and settled in the branches and began to eat the golden apples. Ivan reached up and caught it by the tail. The Firebird tore away and was gone over the wall in a streak of light, and left one blazing feather in his hand.
Page 2
The feather lay on the Tsar's table and lit the whole room, even at noon, even through a cloth. And the Tsar, who was old and had everything, discovered that he now wanted the one thing he did not have. He called his three sons into the great hall in front of the entire court and said that whichever of them brought him the Firebird itself would have half the kingdom while he lived and the whole of it afterwards. The two elder brothers were on their feet before he had finished. Ivan said nothing at all, which the court took for slowness. The truth was that Ivan had held that bird in his hands for a moment and had felt how hot and how frightened and how alive it was, and he was the only person in the room who was not thinking about half a kingdom. He was thinking that a creature like that would die in a cage. He went anyway, because his father had asked.
Page 3
The three brothers rode out together and parted where the road split. There was a grey stone standing at the fork with words cut into it, and the words said: ride to the right and you will be hungry and cold; ride to the left and you will be well fed, but your horse will come to grief; ride straight on and you will lose your way. The elder brothers took the two good roads. Ivan read it twice and took the left-hand road, because he had a long way to go and he thought he could spare the horse sooner than himself — and that is exactly what happened. At dusk an enormous grey wolf came out of the grass, old and scarred and the size of a pony. It sent Ivan's horse bolting home across the steppe, unharmed but riderless, and then it sat down in front of him and said, in a gruff and extremely irritated voice, that the stone had warned him, that he had read the warning, and that he had walked into it anyway, and that it supposed it had better carry him itself.
Page 4
The wolf carried him for three days and set him down outside a high white wall. Behind it, said the wolf, was the garden of Tsar Dolmat, and in the garden hung a golden cage, and in the cage sat the Firebird. Ivan was to climb the wall, take the bird, and leave the cage exactly where it was — and the wolf said this twice, and made him repeat it. So Ivan went over the wall and across the grass, and there she was: a bird made of living light, asleep on her perch with her burning tail hanging down through the bars. He lifted her out as gently as a person lifts a sleeping cat. And then he looked at the cage. It was beautiful, and it was gold, and the whole way back to the wall he thought how foolish it would look to bring his father a bird and no cage to keep her in. So he turned round and took it off its hook — and every string in that garden rang like a bell.
Page 5
They caught him at the wall with the bird under one arm and the cage under the other, and brought him into the courtyard in front of Tsar Dolmat, who was a thin, sharp old man and not nearly as angry as he should have been. When he heard that the thief was a tsar's son on an errand for his father, Dolmat laughed out loud and said he would make a bargain instead of a prison: Ivan could keep the Firebird, cage and all, if he would go to Tsar Afron's country and bring back the horse with the golden mane, which Dolmat had wanted for thirty years. Ivan looked at the ground and said that he would. He did not make a single excuse, and he did not blame the cage, and the whole courtyard noticed it — because a young man who admits a thing plainly is a rarer sight in a palace than a bird made of fire.
Page 6
The wolf carried him a very long way east, and set him down behind Tsar Afron's stables, and gave him exactly the same instruction in exactly the same voice: take the horse, and leave the golden bridle on its nail. Ivan went in past the sleeping grooms. The horse with the golden mane stood at the far end of the stable, white as a cloud, with a mane and tail of pure spun gold that gave off their own soft light, and it came to his hand at once. And on the wall beside it hung a bridle so fine that it made everything else in the building look like firewood. Ivan stood there for a long moment with his eyes shut. He knew. He knew perfectly well. And he took it anyway — and the alarm bells of Tsar Afron's palace went off like a thunderstorm, and Ivan said one short word to himself that no prince should say out loud.
Page 7
Tsar Afron made the same kind of bargain as the last one, and so Ivan found himself sent on a third errand: to bring back Princess Elena the Beautiful. The wolf took him to a lake in a far country, where Elena walked every evening with her women under the willows, and told Ivan to wait in the trees and on no account to come out. Then the Grey Wolf went over the garden wall in one leap, and came back over it with the princess, and set her on his back beside Ivan, and ran. Elena said a great many things about this, all of them fair, and Ivan — who had not planned it and could not undo it — had no answer for any of them and did not pretend to. He told her instead, as they rode, the whole truth from the golden apples onward: the bird, the cage, the bridle, the bargains, all of it, including every part where he had been a fool. It is a very long way from that lake to Persia and back again, and somewhere on the road she stopped being angry with him, and by the time they came down out of the mountains the two of them had grown fond of each other, which Afanasyev says plainly and which nobody has ever been able to improve on.
Page 8
Now there was a difficulty, because Ivan had promised Elena to Tsar Afron and the horse to Tsar Dolmat, and he had no intention of handing over either, and he was not willing to simply break his word and run. So the Grey Wolf sighed the sigh of somebody who has to do everything himself, and solved it. He went to Tsar Afron in Elena's shape — the old wolves of Russia can do that, and ask nobody's permission — and stayed until the real Elena was three days' ride away, and then turned back into a wolf in the middle of the wedding hall and went out of the window, and Tsar Afron sat down on the floor. He did precisely the same thing at Tsar Dolmat's, in the shape of the golden-maned horse. Both tsars had been given exactly what was promised, said the wolf, and keeping it was their own business. Ivan laughed until he had to hold on to a rock. He had the bird, the horse, and Elena, and he had not broken his word to anybody.
Page 9
On the last night, within a day's ride of home, they camped on the edge of the steppe, and Ivan — who had not slept properly in a month — slept like a stone. And that was when his two brothers came by. They had found nothing on their easy roads, and now here was everything, lying in the grass: the Firebird in her cage, the golden-maned horse, Elena asleep in her cloak. So they took the bird and the horse and woke Elena and told her, quietly and quickly, that Ivan was dead and that she must come with them if she wanted to reach a city alive. Then they rode for home, and left their youngest brother asleep in the grass with nothing at all. When Ivan woke at sunrise the camp was empty. He sat there for a long while, not angry — just understanding. Then the Grey Wolf came back over the ridge and lay down beside him and said, gruffly, that it was a good thing somebody in this party stayed awake.
Page 10
So the wolf carried Ivan home, and they were there first, and Ivan did as he was told and said nothing while his two brothers stood in front of the whole court and explained how they had fought their way across the world for the Firebird. He let them finish every word of it. Then he walked out of the crowd. Elena stood up and said, loudly enough for the back of the square, exactly what had happened on the steppe. The two brothers went the colour of beetroot, and old Tsar Berendey looked at his three sons for a long time, and then sent the elder two out to work in the orchard they had been too grand to guard, which they did for a year and which, everyone agreed afterwards, improved them beyond recognition. Ivan married Elena because they had both decided to, and the golden-maned horse ate apples at the gate, and the Grey Wolf came to the wedding, sat in the doorway, ate an enormous amount and went home without saying goodbye. And the Firebird? Ivan never did put her back in the cage. He hung the golden cage empty in the orchard, and she came every single night of his life to eat the golden apples, and nobody in that kingdom ever called her a thief again.
About this story
- Audience: kids (ages 6–12)
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