Note: This story follows the timeline of Nyssa's life as related in Death and the Maidens. A detailed list of that timeline, based on comics canon, can be found in my author profile. A couple of anachronistic words may appear for the reader's convenience. Furthermore, so no one's confused about the way the names appear here, I'm following general Russian literary style of using secondary characters' first names and patronyms. Russian patronyms are constructions of the child's father's first name and a gendered suffix. In the case of this story, Nyssa's patronym combines the name "Ra's" and the suffix –ovna to form the patronym "Rasovna," ultimately making her full name Nyssa Rasovna Raatko. I hope that makes sense.
Prologue: A Death in the Family
St. Petersburg, 1786
Anna Petrovna was dead.
The news moved quickly and easily through the ghetto. Anna had been a lovely young woman, in spite of the abject poverty that kept her face malnourished and her hair dull, and she had a pleasant disposition. Even their most cynical neighbors had enjoyed her company. Within minutes of Anna's final breath, guests were lining up at the open doorway to mourn and to keep vigil over the body. An old woman with dry, cracked hands ferried Nyssa quickly out of the room. Her last look at her mother was nothing more than a fleeting glimpse.
Nyssa Raatko was twelve years old, and though there had never been any word of her father's death, she might as well have been an orphan.
Their ground floor tenement home, one room made into two by a thin partition, remained full throughout the day. At night, the men retreated, leaving the women to clean Anna's body. Nyssa was allowed into the room with them. As they ran the damp rags over her mother's flesh, Nyssa reached forward to stroke Anna Petrovna's bare leg, tracing the cold, pale skin from thigh to foot. She pretended to join in when they prayed, but all she could think about was the feel of her mother's skin beneath her hand.
She did not cry as she watched her mother's body be lowered into the ground. There was little that could make her cry now. Growing up in this part of St. Petersburg, surrounded by squalor and going to bed hungry most nights, she had become accustomed to loss, to pain. She listened to the rabbi's words numbly. The old woman who had pulled her away from Anna Petrovna's deathbed placed her firm hand on Nyssa's shoulder.
"You will be all right, Nyssa Rasovna," she whispered to the young girl, with a voice like dead leaves. "Your people will take care of you."
Nyssa nodded, suffering the woman's hand though she felt no connection to her. She had never even considered what would happen to her without her mother. Even now, she could scarcely think of it. Her life was forever changed, and she felt nothing.
She walked back to the tenement in a line of mourners. Keeping her head lowered, she stared at the ground, kicking away the tiny pebbles that scattered over her thin shoes. She would need a new pair soon. There was no money now. Anna Petrovna had been a laundress until her lungs began filling with blood. At first, she had tried to continue her work, sending Nyssa to fetch and deliver what was needed. Then there was too much blood, and her body was too weak. Those outside the ghetto for whom she had once worked learned of her condition and stopped sending for her. For the last months of Anna Petrovna's illness, they had lived off the charity of their neighbors.
The wealthy didn't come very far into this neighborhood. The sight and scent of poverty drove them back into their own territory quickly enough. A few of Anna Petrovna's lot had been able, with the rarest of opportunities, to find work amongst the moneyed classes, but Anna Petrovna had never had that fortune herself. She worked wherever she could find it, and that usually meant nowhere near the palatial homes and hotels that graced the city's center.
It was someone far better off than they were that had killed Anna Petrovna - a merchant's wife, with milk-white skin and a lovely singing voice that could have gotten her put on a stage if she'd had the right chance. Her voice was lost to coughing fits. Anna Petrovna had gone into the merchant's home to retrieve the linens she was paid to wash every week. One week, she took more than sheets back out with her. The sickness settled into her lungs like a long lost relative coming home, as if it had always belonged there.
When Anna became ill, the rabbi tied a kerchief around Nyssa's mouth and nose, leaving her blue eyes as her only visible feature.
"Like a harem girl," Anna Petrovna had said, smiling despite her urge to cough.
"A what?" It was a foreign word to her, and felt clumsy on her tongue when she repeated it.
Her mother laughed quietly. "It is a kind of woman who lives where your father is from. A very beautiful woman." She touched the top of her daughter's head, and Nyssa felt strangely comforted. She had never thought of herself as beautiful before. It wasn't a word that was spoken often here.
But like any girl her age might have, she fantasized about becoming beautiful. She stole glances at the women getting in and out of carriages, when her mother took her out into the city, far from the ghetto. Greedily, she imagined herself as one of them. She saw a future version of herself, tall and lovely, swathed in the finest clothes. She was allowed to enter stately homes and hotels by the front, and porters held doors open for her, nodding in deference as she passed. Nameless men draped furs across her shoulders. She lifted glasses of expensive wine to her lips. And never did anyone remark of her former poverty or call her a "little Jewish bitch."
Such a future could never be hers in St. Petersburg. The ghetto became thicker by the year, as more and more poor people, most of them also Jews, poured into the city. Women and girls, some only a few years older than Nyssa, gave birth to more mouths to feed. A girl could become a whore for a wealthier man, but never his wife, nor even his lover. To be born in this ghetto was to remain there until death.
When Anna Petrovna spoke of the exotic women of the south, the tiniest flicker of hope began in Nyssa that she might become something more when her father returned. Ra's al Ghul was coming back, her mother frequently reminded her. Any day now, he would ride back into St. Petersburg on his magnificent horse to whisk his family off to a far lovelier place. How confused their neighbors would be, to see that Anna Petrovna hadn't lied about her child's father after all! How envious! He would set them upon horses of their own, and they would bid good riddance to the ghetto without ever looking back.
But as her mother grew weaker, consumption slowly breaking down her body until her every breath rattled, Nyssa knew it was nothing more than a fantasy. She never doubted the story of the Arabian prince, but she realized the prince was never coming back. He had abandoned Anna Petrovna. He would never know that she had waited for him, that she had borne him a daughter. Just like the girls who wandered through the ghetto in unwed disgrace, their bellies big from men they could never name, Anna Petrovna was going to die shamed, hopeless, and alone.
It was a brutal truth, one that the child accepted when the mother could not. The kerchief across her face was no longer a sign that she belonged outside the ghetto; it was merely a layer of dingy fabric, meant to protect her from the disease that was slowly killing her mother. She was nothing more than a poor girl living in a ghetto in a city that bustled with aristocracy. She would, like her mother, live to serve others but have nothing for herself.
There were no mirrors in their home to be covered in the wake of Anna Petrovna's death. But Nyssa caught sight of herself in the reflective surface of the window, and in her own face, she saw not the beautiful woman she had fantasized about becoming, but a dirty-faced little girl with hardened eyes and a mouth that pulled too easily into a scowl. She saw the reflection of the room that had been her home behind her, a dusty, drafty space that was hardly suitable for even a dog. If this was what Anna Petrovna had left behind, then she was better off.
The sheets upon which her mother died were burned for fear of disease. The night after the funeral, Nyssa slept uncovered upon the thin, tattered mattress, silently cursing the cold and the father she'd never met.
Chapter I: The Prince
St. Petersburg, 1786-1787
The old woman, Yefa Mihalovna Olevskaya, took her in. Only two streets away from the tenement where Nyssa had lived with her mother, Yefa Mihalovna's home was up a rickety flight of stairs and comprised three small rooms, space enough for her two adult children and three grandchildren. Nyssa's lodging was not free, however. They were too poor for that. Nyssa earned her keep by helping with the younger children, with cooking and the laundry. She carried heavy pales of water up the steps on tired legs. Once, whilst helping with the meager dinner preparations, she was so overcome by hunger that she snuck a scrap of raw meat into her mouth, then vomited it back up only minutes later. If any of the family knew of her greed, they said nothing. Yefa Mihalovna stroked her back lightly as she shuddered late in the night, her stomach still cramping in agony.
She began to take up her mother's profession. Joining older girls and women on the street where they gossiped over their buckets and washboards, Nyssa plunged her hands into the fire-warmed water for hours each week, often scraping her knuckles against the coarse wood of the wash bucket. Her hands grew chapped in the cold weather, and they ached at all hours.
"You had beautiful hands," Yefa Mihalovna mused one night, as Nyssa lay out the pallet on which she would sleep, being careful not to knock her hand too hard upon the floor. "What a pity to see them go."
Nyssa did not answer.
"A quiet girl," her matron continued. "Not at all like Anna Petrovna. Now, she was fond of her stories." The old woman chuckled, over a memory perhaps.
"You mean my father," Nyssa said, curling up on the pallet and covering herself with a blanket made from old clothes.
Yefa Mihalovna nodded. "Her Arabian prince. Her noble lord of the south. Guest of Catherine herself."
Nyssa's eyes widened. "The Empress?"
"Herself. He came to see the Empress, but found your mother along the way."
Nyssa knew the story well enough. Anna Petrovna had lived outside the city then, and had been washing linens (her destined profession, it seemed) in the river when a strange convoy had stopped to water their horses. Nyssa's father did not travel in a carriage, as many rich men did, but rather dismounted an enormous, powerful stallion at the head of the convoy. He was wearing a green cape ("It was his favorite color, I believe," Anna Petrovna would whisper to her daughter, as she told the story that could warm her when the fire did not), and the wind caught it as he stepped down from his steed. To the peasant girl, he had immediately seemed a figure out of legend.
Fascinated, Anna Petrovna left the linen and crept into the bushes that lined the riverbank. But she was not a stealthy tracker, and the horses heard the leaves rustling around her - as did the men. Her face emerged through the brush to find the entire convoy staring directly at her. She froze, petrified in an awkward crawling position, as she saw one of the men raise a bow, his arrow aimed directly at her.
Then the man in the green cape lifted his hand, a stern command to hold off.
"Are you armed?" he called to the frightened young woman, his Russian clearly fluent, though bearing an accent unlike any Anna Petrovna had ever heard before.
Anna Petrovna swallowed before answering: "No."
"Are you alone?"
"Yes."
The man in green smiled. "Then by all means, go about your business. The river belongs to us all, does it not?"
She nodded, offering him a smile. Returning to her linens, she rinsed and wrung and laid out to dry, sneaking shy glimpses at the leader of this strange troupe. Her attention did not go unnoticed. Within an hour, she noticed the man who had notched his bow crossing the water, stepping gracefully across the rocks despite his size, and carelessly letting the water flow over his high boots when the rocks were submerged. A lump arose in her throat. She pretended she hadn't seen him, but years of warnings about what men might gladly do to a woman caught out alone screamed at her to run. But she could not move. Just as she had been in the bushes, she felt paralyzed, held to the very spot.
The big man approached her casually, making no attempts to either escape her notice or rush upon her. He folded his arms over his broad chest when he came to her, and daring to glance up from her work, Anna Petrovna saw that they were covered in inked inscriptions, dark calligraphies and cryptograms that seemed to bespeak a distant paradise.
"The master requests to know the lady's name," the man said, in a formal, respectful tone. His Russian was easy and fluid.
"Anna," she mumbled, fear seizing in her bones. "Anna Petrovna Raatko."
"The master requests a word with you, Anna Petrovna."
She nodded silently. She knew she should not go to him. Her mother and father had both spoken harshly of the ways of men. But, daring another glance at the green-draped man, their words became the faintest whispers in her mind. Even from across the river, his eyes bore into hers, and his slight, regal smile seemed almost reassuring.
She rose, gasping as, without warning, the tattooed man lifted her. He carried her back over the water as easily as if she were a child. He set her down immediately on the other side, allowing her to walk to the man he called 'Master.' This close to the convoy, it was painfully obvious that not only had they come from a very great distance, but also that their leader was indeed far wealthier than anyone Anna Petrovna had ever met before. Even his servants were dressed better than she. From behind the curtains of a fine carriage, feminine eyes peeked out at her, lined in dark kohl. She felt humiliated just to be in the presence of such people.
The caped man - the master - bowed deeply and kissed her hand when she came to him. A hot blush rose in her cheeks. As his lips brushed her skin, she imagined she could feel the heat of his homeland.
The tattooed servant passed her name along to him. He bowed again, and spoke in perfect Russian: "I am called Ra's al Ghul."
The name meant nothing to her, but the very sound of it humbled her.
"You are a prince," she said, beaming up at him.
He laughed quietly. "Something of that nature. Tell me, Anna Petrovna, have you been to St. Petersburg?"
She left with him that day, abandoning the linens on the riverbank. Her heart got the better of her, she would later tell her daughter. The sight of this man, the scent of him, the touch of his lips on the back of her hand overcame her. There was no logic in her actions, no concern for the consequences.
She lived like a princess in the city. For her own dignity, he installed her in a suite with the other women in his company. At first, Anna Petrovna was jealous of them, fearing that the prince had taken them all as lovers. They spoke no Russian and could not tell her otherwise, but their ethereal beauty, elaborate clothes, and piercing eyes reminded her of her own inadequacy.
"They are novelties for your Empress, trained in dance," her prince assured her. "I have never touched them, nor have I any desire to."
It could not have been a lie, for Anna was called to their master's bedroom each night. Several months later, her prince was called away, leaving her only with dozens of pretty promises…and a belly that soon began to swell.
There was no recourse for a Jewish peasant girl. As quickly as Anna Petrovna had been whisked into the finest hotels, she found herself turned away, with no money of her own and a condition that could not be long denied. Her parents had feared her kidnapped; when they learned, via a tearstained letter, what had actually happened, they disowned her. She had no choice but to go to the ghettos, where at least she was with her own people. When her child was born, she bore her indignity as best she could, giving her daughter her own surname but formed of the prince's title a proper patronym, forever marking the girl as a foreign bastard - but her bastard, the product of her brief love.
She claimed she'd never regretted her affair.
"He gave me hope for a new life," she told her daughter. "He gave me you."
And now Anna Petrovna was dead, and her Arabian prince had never returned, and the old woman spoke of their story as if it were a fairy tale.
"You did not believe her," Nyssa said, her blue eyes staring coldly at Yefa Mihalovna.
The woman chuckled, the laugh of old women to whom such questions ultimately did not matter. "I do not believe your mother was a liar. But a young woman's mind can run away with her. It can create stories out of the tiniest moments."
Nyssa liked Yefa Mihalovna well enough, and she herself had often questioned her mother's story, but she would not tolerate such doubt from another. "Quiet, crone," she hissed, and rolling onto her side, she closed her eyes and pretended to sleep. The old woman continued tending the small fire behind her. Trying to dream, Nyssa listened to the steel rod shifting the burning wood.
She had very few things to be grateful for. Fire was one; the stomach that had been partly filled with the food from Yefa Mihalovna's table was another. She had clothes on her back, which she knew some children did not. Winter was beginning and her shoes were too thin, but her feet were not yet bare. She had not been sold into the service of rich people who would spit upon her. The old woman's family did not beat her. She did not have to beg. The ache that had begun in her hands as the frigid air dried them each day was nothing compared to the pain that many other girls her age endured.
And yet the anger grew in her. Under her mother's care, the insults that were sometimes hurled at her did not sting, but with Anna Petrovna's death, they came flooding back to her, assaulting her like the bites of insects. The old woman's gentle voice only made her resentment grow. Her amused laughter as she spoke of Anna Petrovna gave birth to a new kind of bitterness in Nyssa's soul.
She would not be made a laughingstock, whether by good intentions or not. Her mother's story was her own to believe, or disbelieve. Though she was grateful for Yefa Mihalovna's care, the mere suggestion that Anna Petrovna had embellished the truth meant only one thing to Nyssa. She would never open her heart to this woman. She would do what was asked of her in order to remain under this roof, but nothing more, nothing that required any kind of attachment to her hosts.
Already, she knew she would not be staying long.
Post-chapter note: This one was mostly just establishing character background. I promise that more stuff will actually happen in the next one.