The Ghost Drum Quotes

A delightful fairy tale about a prince who gets rescued from a tower by a female shaman. Set in medieval Russia with Lapland witches.

Czar Guidon kept his son Safa imprisoned in a tower. His power could only be matched by the witch-girl Chingis.

“She heard the outer door of the house open, and slam shut. Raising her head, she looked down from the stove-top and saw the inner door fly open. In hurried a tall figure, hidden under a big fur hat and a long, quilted, padded, fantastically embroidered coat.”

“In a place far distant from where you are now grows an oak-tree by a lake. Round the oak’s trunk is a chain of golden links. Tethered to the chain is a learned cat, and this most learned of all cats walks round and round the tree continually.”

Out of the frozen wastes she studied the words and runes that would give her power to understand the messages of the ghost drum. At last she heard Safa’s cries.

The woman is afraid - the child is not hers but her master’s - but she gives her baby anyway, hoping desperately it will have a life better than her own.

It is an original fairy tale using elements from Russian history and Russian folklore. Like many traditional tales it is full of cruelty, violence and sudden death.

“As it walks one way, it sings songs. As it walks the other, it tells stories. This is one of the stories the cat tells.”

“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?”

It begins with a slave-woman giving birth to a daughter in the frozen depths of winter. A witch appears, asking for the child, promising to raise it as a shaman.