Deathless

by Catherynne Valente

  Marya allowed herself a smug smile. She hadn’t a scratch from her firebird.

  “But the Yelenas,” she whispered. “I can’t bear to think of them. There must be a mistake. I have to talk to him. I have to—” Maybe it was all nothing, or the old witch was lying just to upset her, and she would laugh with Koschei about it in the morning.

  “What, hear him explain? Grovel? I can understand wanting him to crawl. I’m sure he’s made you do enough of that, and what have you done to deserve it? Had pretty breasts and memorized a bit of poetry? Listen, devotchka. A baba knows. Just tell yourself a story that’ll satisfy you and pretend he told it. Save you a bowlful of trouble.”

  “I thought you didn’t want him to marry.”

  “I don’t give two teats whether he marries or not. But I won’t tolerate his bringing hang-jaw, lackwit brats into the family.” Chairman Yaga crooked her finger at the oak vat. Her long, warped fingernail sparked as she cut a tiny, neat hole in the side of the thing, then tipped her head to slurp the vodka spurting out. Liquor splashed onto her dry tongue as she lapped and slurped away. Finally, the crone wiped her mouth with her sleeve and traced her finger the other way, sewing up the hole. “And you have to admit, I’ve a devil of a habit for being right. Which of those brats didn’t pounce on the first potato-gobbling cretin that passed her way? Which of them didn’t plot against Koschei? He’s been hurt, my brother, so often. I only want what’s best for him. Tell yourself that, if it helps you smile when he kisses you. And you’d better smile. I’ve been married seventeen times, Marya Morevna. Do you have any idea how much I know about men? And women! Don’t look so shocked—after an eon or two of being a wife you’ll want one of your own, too. Fiendishly convenient things, wives. Better than cows. They’ll love you for beating them, and work ’til they die.”

  “I’m not like that.”

  “We’ll see. Anyway, what I know about marriage could fill the sky on a starless night. I don’t get to give the tests because I buttered up the right kommissar. I give them because I know. A wife must terrify, she must have a stronger arm than a boyar, and she must know how to rule. That’s all that matters, in the end. Who is to rule. And if you can’t, tscha! You’ve no business with a ring.”

  Marya lifted her chin. “And if I don’t want one?”

  “You wanted one this morning. What’s changed? That he had a herd of girlfriends before you? Surely you didn’t think deathless meant dickless. Those are nice girls! Hoarding virginity is a criminal act, like hoarding food. Besides, don’t forget the part where I eat your bones if you fail. Better married than rendered into girl-broth and maiden-cutlets.”

  10

  The Raskovnik

  “What’s it look like?” said Naganya, polishing her long walnut legs with viscous oil. She poured the golden stuff onto her skin and giggled as it tickled, trickling into the gunmetal works in the hollows of her knees. She adjusted the bony sighting over her right eye.

  “How should I know? I’ve never heard of it.” Masha threw herself disconsolately onto the little velvet chair perched near her cosmetics table. The sun knocked at the windows, turning the red curtains into flames. She never used the cosmetics, though Lebedeva was forever coaxing her to learn the arcane rites of powder and rouge crème. Still, they were there, in small black pots like fell unguents, untouched, but waiting.

  Naganya shrugged. “Oh, well, I’ve heard of it. Some hairy little herb that unlocks all locks, supposedly. But that’s not the fun part. The sport of it is, you find raskovnik by locking an old lady up in iron leg shackles and making her walk across a field at the dark of the moon. Wherever her chains fall off—poof! Raskovnik. Never seen the stuff, though. It’s murder to keep fresh—lilies last longer in a vase full of dust.”

  “I have to bring it to Chairman Yaga by tomorrow, or she’ll have me in her soup pot. She’s already looking through her cabinets for recipes.” Chairman Yaga had made sure she could not see Koschei, kept him busy and closeted, so that she could do nothing but obey the vicious, ancient witch’s whims. “Do you think we could get Lebedeva to do it? She’s a bit old.”

  The vintovnik laughed, the greased metal of her jaw clicking like a gun firing on empty rounds. “I shall tell her you said so next time she pinches my cheeks and fusses with my hair. No good, though: has to be an old human lady. Scarcity drives desire, you know. We haven’t had any proper old grandmothers here in a kingfisher’s year.”

  “Then what am I to do? I don’t want to be soup.” And if I cannot get the crown, I cannot get the Yelenas free.

  “And you want to marry Koschei. To be worthy.”

  Marya Morevna frowned into her chest. “I should go thrash those dogs of his and toss his death off a cliff, that’s what I should do. Nasha, you didn’t see those women! He ought to be scrambling to prove he’s worthy of me!”

  Nasha squirmed. Her great dark eyes creased with worry. “But I did see them. I did. When they lived in this room. When they met Chairman Yaga. And I met the other men, too.”

  “What other men?”

  “The Ivans. Wherever there is a Yelena or a Vasilisa, there is an Ivan. Surely Babushka told you. About the bogatyrs? They aren’t too bright, usually, but bless me if they aren’t a handsome species. They’re always the youngest of three sons. They’re always the honest type, dumb as toenails but big in the trousers. And the Yelenas, they always fall in love and run off. I remember one Ivan came with a wolf, a huge grey monster of a beast. The wolf did all the work, tricking Koschei into telling them where his death was, telling Ivan what to say so that Yelena the Bright would swoon in her seat for him, even though he was a youngest son with no inheritance and mud under his nails. The two of them rode off astride the wolf when it was all said and done. They left Koschei bleeding in the snow. When they’d safely gone, he picked himself up and washed the blood off. He stood watching the road for a long time, like he thought she might come back. But what can you do? Gone means gone. He didn’t come out of the Chernosvyat for weeks. Chairman Yaga won’t even say the name Ivan anymore, she hates them so. If she meets one on the street—snick, snick! She eats him up on the spot, and belches like a grain commissioner, so everyone will know she isn’t sorry.”

  “You knew them? You slept curled up with them and you know where they are? But you don’t try to rescue them?”

  Naganya scowled. “Chyerti don’t go in for rescuing. If you eat rotten fish, you’re bound to get sick. If you’re a faithless spittoon of a woman, you end up in the factory. It’s only common sense. And besides, people being miserable is natural. Just like it’s natural for an imp to enjoy them being miserable. As a system, it works terrifically well.”

  Marya picked at her nails. She knew the answer before she said it. “And if I end up there, you won’t come for me, either?”

  Naganya the vintovnik looked away, her oily hair falling into her face.

  “Well,” said Marya softly. “If I ever meet a man named Ivan I shall eat his heart before he can wish me a good morning.”

  Nasha grinned, eager to skate over such uncomfortable subjects. “That’s on account of how you’re one of us, Mashenka! Spleen and sleeping, marrow and mind. Now, there’s raskovnik to dig up, and not much time.”

  “If we need a human, how can we ever get back to a city without Volchya-Yagoda and an armful of weeks to spare?”

  “There’s border places. Places where the birches are thinner than paper, and you can tear through. Places where the Tsar of Life and the Tsar of Death fought so hard that their territories lie crushed right up to each other, on either side of a pebble, in the leaves and root of a turnip, on a cat’s tail and his tongue.”

  “I should try to see him again, before we go. Baba Yaga can’t keep me out if he hears my voice. Surely he will wrap me up in his arms and tell me—”

  “Don’t, Masha.” Naganya fidgeted. “The war is going badly.”

  “The war is always going badly.”

  * * *

  Marya and
Naganya took a young horse, green and fleet and hungry, and trotted down Skorohodnaya Road in the evening light, the vintovnik tucked in front of Marya herself, clutching the saddle horn with her wooden hands. Twilight drifted lazily, taking its time bringing down a violet-pink haze. The last rays of sun winked on their stallion’s ears.

  “I make horses nervous,” Naganya fretted. The safety in her cheek cocked and uncocked sharply, echoing down the road. “Surely this one will rear and drop me! And then roll over on top of us both!”

  “I chose a young one, who has not yet heard that you sometimes shoot people. It will be all right.” The horse snorted; snow bleated from his nose.

  Naganya twisted in her seat as the road dwindled behind them and the wood rose up, dark and excited, icy and rustling. She grabbed her friend by the chin. “Marya, listen like your ears are bottomless! Border places are dangerous. Very disreputable things live there. You must be careful or Koschei will smelt me for losing you. If you see anyone you know, or someone with a silver star on their breast, you mustn’t talk to them, not even to curse them or ask their names. You mustn’t get off the horse. If your foot touches the ground, I won’t be able to help you. Even the enemy’s pebbles bite and are fierce. I shall find the old lady for you. I shall push her across the field.”

  “Isn’t that cheating?”

  “Tfu! She expects you to cheat! Masha, whom I love: These tasks do not test your strength or your wiliness; they test your ability to cheat, which is the truest measure of a devil. They are designed to be impossible if you play fair. What should you do instead? Walk into no-man’s-land unprotected and be lost forever?”

  “Is that what the others did? Did you tell the Yelenas these things?”

  “Yes! And they refused to listen because they were innocent maidens without a lie in their hearts or a smear on their souls. Don’t be innocent, Marya. Innocent means stupid. Follow your friend, who is a goblin and knows better, and we’ll have raskovnik salad before dawn.”

  But if I am not innocent, are there lies in my heart? Smears on my soul? Am I a devil? What does it mean, to be one of them? Marya resolved to sort it all out when she had a moment to think through it, when Baba Yaga’s soup pot was not dangling over her head.

  The forest deepened, the birches filling with crows, the underbrush with red, pointed hedgehog eyes. Overhead, violet seeped out of the sky and black crept up until only the sharp, cutting stars sliced through the night. Naganya’s body warmed against her own; she worked the trigger in her throat gently to keep her oils from freezing. Finally, the wood opened up into a wide glade where the snow flowed even and smooth as water. A dozen houses glowed and smoked and did the sorts of things village houses do in the dark of winter. Naganya whooped, her cry echoing through the owls like one of their own. An old woman crept out of one of the smallest houses and into the snow. Once she had passed the ring of light cast by all those windows, she squatted in the field, the hissing of her urine loud in the silent evening.

  “We’ve luck like a mushroom hunter tonight, Marya! Look at her, all fat and full of juice!” Naganya hopped lightly off the horse, neither sinking in the snow nor leaving tracks, but dancing on it like a mayfly on a lake.

  “Why is it safe for you and not for me?” whispered Marya Morevna.

  “Because you’re still a girl.” The vintovnik grinned. “Girls have to obey rules. Chyerti break them.”

  The rifle imp scampered off through the snow. Marya nudged her horse along to keep her friend in sight.

  “Pssst, babushka!” Nasha hissed. “Old lazy slattern! How many babies have you got off your man, hm? Spend your life with your legs open, do you? Just leaves room for the devil to slip in!”

  The old woman started and looked around her—right at Naganya—but saw nothing.

  “Shame on you, baba! Haven’t even got the decency to get up to witchcraft in your old age! Just lie about, why don’t you? Screech at brats got from half your neighbors. Plump my pillows! Feed me cherries!”

  The old woman shivered, peering hard into the dark.

  “Babushka! Put your ankles together for once! What if Christ comes back tonight and the first things he sees are your saggy old bones pissing in the snow like a horse? Straight back to paradise with him, on the double quick, that’s what!”

  The woman leapt up, drawing her knees together with a dry knocking sound. Naganya dove down and clapped her irons on the old lady’s legs, giggling.

  “Marya,” came a soft voice. But Marya reminded herself not to speak to anyone, and stared straight ahead.

  “March, Comrade Lazybones!” cried the vintovnik. She boxed one of her own ears, stamped her foot, and shot three bullets out of her mouth with the soft psht psht psht of a silencer. The shots landed all around the old grandmother but did not hurt her, only made her leap forward like a spooked cow. “Faster! Faster! The police are after you! Run! You remember how to hike up your skirts!”

  The woman bawled and stumbled, her ankles tangling up in the manacles. “Don’t fall or I shall have you arrested for wasting your life on babies and borscht!”

  “Marya,” said the voice again. Marya squeezed her eyes shut. I will not answer, she thought frantically.

  Naganya nipped at her human’s heels, spitting silenced bullets and whacking at her toes with bayonets Marya had not known she hid under her arms.

  “Don’t cry, you wrinkly old camel! Just think of the stories you’ll have to tell all the other spitting beasts! The devil chased you through the snow! You’ll be Queen Camel, prize pisser!”

  “Marya Morevna, look at me.”

  Marya could not help it. She looked down. A beautiful young woman stood below her horse, her blond hair gathered up in an elegant ballerina’s bun. She wore a thick white fur coat, the kind a man gives to his mistress. On her chest glimmered a splattering of light, as though someone had thrown a bucket of molten silver onto her. It glowed like a watery star.

  “Svetlana Tikhonovna!” Marya gasped.

  “Yes, it is me,” the woman said. “Come down and hug me, my darling. I was one-twelfth your mother, after all.”

  Svetlana held out her arms. The star on her breast rippled.

  “I’m not supposed to.” But she felt her eyes burning with tears. She had not known how much she wished to see a human face, a motherly face.

  “The Marya I know didn’t care much for supposed to. You stole my hairbrush, after all, and ran off in the middle of the night like an ungrateful brat. But I give without bitterness, as a mother should.”

  “How can you be here, Svetlana? This is the other side of the world.” Marya’s fingers ached to brush her icy cheek, to say, What of my birth mother? What of my father? Any word of my sisters? And I am not a brat.

  “So true, so true! Well, the tale of it is, I died a few months after you left. I couldn’t help it, I was so hungry. When the police came to question my husband about his club memberships, I spat at them and told them they ought to be shamed, to be so fat, in their big apartments, while my babies and I didn’t remember what meat tasted like! You can’t say that sort of thing. I knew that. I think I was just tired of being alive. It’s no good, these days, being alive.”

  “I like it,” whispered Marya.

  “That’s because you don’t live in Leningrad. Can you believe it? It’s Leningrad now that the old dragon is dead. They keep changing the name. Mark me, in twenty years they’ll call it Lemon Popsicle and shoot people who laugh when they say it. Life is nice when there’s cucumber soup and eye powder the color of scallions and a samovar piping away on every table. I forgot how nice, until I came to the Country of Death, where Viy is Tsar and the ghosts of the meals the living eat make all our larders groan. Come down, Masha. I’ll give you a candy.”

  “I’m afraid. I don’t want to go back. I don’t want to be hungry. I don’t want to be ordinary and ignored. And I certainly don’t want to be dead. My home is in Buyan, in the Country of Life.”

  “Your home is Leningrad,” S
vetlana Tikhonovna snarled. “You’ve only forgotten it.”

  “I haven’t! But you can leave your home and find someplace new. People do it all the time. Why can’t I?”

  Svetlana Tikhonovna shrugged as if it didn’t matter to her in the least. “Come and kiss my cheeks, devotchka, and I will tell you how beautiful you’ve grown up to be. What have the living to fear from the dead?”

  Naganya whooped from the far corner of the field, where the woman had stopped, her manacles springing off with a clang. The old grandmother set off at a dead run back to her house, and the vintovnik danced, the shackles jangling in her hand.

  Marya shook her head. She felt as if a silver fog clung to her head, making her dull and drowsy. “Svieta, you do not mean to kiss me, really.”

  Svetlana Tikhonovna cackled and leapt at her, clawing and grasping at her leg. Folk spiraled up out of the snow like smoke, men and women and children, all with the silver splatter of death on their chests, all hungry and showing their teeth.

  “Come down, come down!” they wept. “We only want to love you, and embrace you! You are so warm! Why should our enemy have all your kisses?”

  A hundred cold fingers pulled at Marya, and no rider can stay on their horse with such hands on their skin. She toppled and fell into the mass of them, snow and vapor puffing up around her. As one they fell on her, weeping all the while. They did not bite her or claw her, but kissed her, over and over, their lips on her flesh. With every kiss she felt colder and colder, thinner and thinner, as though the night wind might blow her away. Svetlana Tikhonovna lay against her, her full, frosted lips closing over the mouth of Marya Morevna.