At the end of its golden chain, the scholar-cat walks round the oak and, as it walks, it tells this tale.

Did the slave-woman dream (asks the cat) or did a witch truly take her baby? And, if a witch truly came, did the witch tell the truth, or did she take the baby, roast it, and eat it at a witches’ picnic? I shall think of the answers to these questions (says the cat) and while I am thinking, I shall tell of the Czar who rules this Czardom, the Great and Mighty, the Royal, the Compassionate, Czar Guidon.

Czar Guidon, that spindly-legged, spindly-armed, fat-bellied man, like a spider. That man who calls himself God on Earth, and who murdered all his brothers and uncles and cousins to make himself Czar. That wicked (but whisper this) wicked, wicked man, the Czar Guidon.

I shall tell of the Czar’s sister, the Imperial Princess Margaretta, who dyes her hair blue and never says what she means, but lies all the time. She was a small girl when her brother murdered all their relatives, and so he let her live. Now he wishes he had murdered her too.

I shall tell (says the cat) of how the Czar found and married the woman Farida.

And I shall tell of Czar Guidon’s son, the unfortunate, the lonely Safa Czarevich.

Now (says the cat) I begin.

The riches of Czar Guidon were beyond all counting, all reckoning, for he owned everything in his Czardom: every coin, every jewel, every crumb of soil and clod of clay; every mountain, every hill, every hole.

He owned every animal, wild or tame, alive or dead; and he owned every flower, every shoot, whether it grew in a wood, or in a field, in a garden, a window-box, a pot, or a crack in a wall.

If a bird or an insect flew over the border into his Czardom, then he owned it.

He owned the air they flew in. He owned the air in the lungs of his people.

He owned the people.

But he had no wife and no children.

The Czar’s chair stood at the top of a tall flight of steps in the court-room at the centre of the Imperial Palace. The chair’s back was like the spread tail of a peacock, covered with bright eyes of enamel and jewels. The Czar’s advisers came and lay on their bellies at the foot of the Czar-chair’s steps, and they cried,

‘Oh, Compassionate Czar, do not punish us, but let us speak.’

The Czar nodded to his captain, who stood on the Czar-chair’s lowest steps, and the captain stamped his foot as a sign that the advisers might speak.

‘Oh, Compassionate Czar,’ said the oldest of the advisers, ‘we beg you, take a wife, and have children with her, so there will be a Czar to rule us in the years to come.’

This angered the Czar, but his anger passed, and he said, ‘There shall be a bride-choosing.’

Among those gathered in the court-room was the Imperial Princess Margaretta. Smiling, she stepped forward in her blue silks and blue sapphires, and she said, ‘I am so pleased that my Imperial Brother is to take a wife. May I wish him, with all sincerity, a very happy marriage, and a dozen beautiful children to sit on his knee?’ All the courtiers politely clapped the Princess’s speech, but not one of them believed her. Everyone knew that the Princess wanted to be Czaritsa after her brother’s death, and if he had children, she would only have the trouble of murdering them.

Everyone knew this: but still the Princess made her polite little speech and tried to sound as if she meant it; and still the courtiers applauded and tried to look as if they believed it. This is the way of Czars’ courts.

But listen, (says the cat) the bride-choosing began.

Messengers were sent to every city, town and village, to every house and hut, in the whole Czardom; and the message they carried was: ‘Every unmarried woman above the age of twelve must present herself at the Imperial City before the month is out. The Czar will choose a bride! Long live the Czar Guidon!’

The message brought sorrow to the land. Each family looked at their unmarried daughters or sisters and dreaded that they might be chosen to be the Czar’s bride – a terrible thing, for Czars were cruel, and the relatives of Czars were crueller still.

How long would the chosen bride live before being poisoned or smothered, or stabbed to death by the Imperial Princess?

By slow carts, dressed in their oldest clothes, with their hair hacked short and ragged, all the unmarried women of the land made their way, from every part of the land, to the Imperial City. Their families wept for them, and prayed that the Czar would not like them.

In the Imperial City, hundreds of carpenters were at work, building houses where the women would live while the Czar chose from among them.

Hundreds of joiners made beds and stools and chests for the houses; and thousands of seamstresses stitched blankets, sheets, curtains and dresses.

Tons of food were brought to huge kitchens, where hundreds of cooks worked over hundreds of fires to provide meals for the women; barrels of water were brought into the city, for the women’s washing, until it was said the rivers were dry.

Swarms of clerks wrote down the women’s names, and the names of the places they came from.

There were thousands and thousands of women. Noble and slave-women; widowed women; old, middle-aged and young women; mere girls.

When the month was over, and every one of the new houses was filled with women, the clerks went from house to house, inspecting and questioning them all. They were to decide which of the women could be sent home without even being seen by the Czar. They knew that the Czar wanted a pretty wife, but a clever one too, and they set tests for the women to pass; simple tests at first.

The women made the choice hard by trying to answer stupidly, to hide the skills they had. But the Czar was waiting, and the clerks were not over-long in making their decisions.

The next day, hundreds of women were sent home, a few in disappointed tears, the many in tears of thankfulness and relief. Back they went to their families and a happier life than they could ever have had in the Imperial City.

Those women who remained had to answer harder questions and pass stricter tests, sitting their exams in Czaritsaship. More of them were sent home; and the tests were made harder still. The clerks puzzled, argued, and made difficult choices, before sending home another hundred, and then another hundred, and another, until, of all the thousands who had come to the Imperial City for the bride-choosing, only one was left. That one was a young slave-woman from the south of the country. She was tall, dark-haired, dark-eyed, brown-skinned, beautiful and clever – but not so clever that she could be stupid. Her name was Farida.

She had been born in a small, poor house with wooden walls and an earthen floor: now she was to be the lady of the Imperial Palace, which was as big as a town. A town of roofed streets which were corridors; of hills, which were stairs; of rooms as large as parade-grounds or market-squares, where fountains fell into marble bowls as wide as lakes. It was dark in the Palace, even when it was daylight outside, because the windows were not of glass, but of fine, polished sheets of stone; and the stone was painted with the Imperial Eagle, and the Imperial Bear; with the Holy Golden Crowns, and the Flowering Tree of Life.

Farida explored long passages, passing from a cloudily candle-lit gloom to a gloom turned golden and rich by light falling through the gold of the Holy Crowns; and then into an emerald gloom, darker and greener than that of any forest, and on into the rich blue and scarlet gloom of the Eagle. Worse than the airless darkness of these corridors was the silence. No one spoke, not the guards nor the servants: talk was forbidden. Thick carpets swallowed the sounds of footsteps. This was the house of the Czar, the God on Earth, and only he was allowed to speak aloud without special permission. Servants and guards were whipped for making clatter. The Palace’s silence was ancient and frightening.

It was all strange to Farida. She was given new clothes, taught to behave in new ways, and was not allowed to keep her own name. The day before her marriage, she was taken to the Imperial Chapel and baptised a second time. She was told that she had been reborn, and was no longer the slave Farida, but Katrina, the chosen bride of Guidon.

To herself, she was still Farida.

Czar Guidon and Katrina-Who-Had-Been-Farida were married, Katrina was crowned, and the feast lasted three days. All the nobles of the Czardom were there, to swear loyalty to the new Czaritsa. The Imperial Princess Margaretta, dressed in blue silk, blue diamonds and blue sapphires, and with her hair freshly dyed blue, swore not only loyalty but love, to her new sister. She spoke with such sincerity in her voice, and such a look of true affection on her face, that everyone watching her knew that she wished the Czaritsa dead, and was already planning ways to kill her.

Many, many people pitied the Czaritsa, and none of them expected her to survive for long; but weeks went...