Deathless

by Catherynne Valente

  Zemlehyed took off his officer’s cap and cradled it in his muscled, oak-root arms. His wild black hair stuck out in licks and corkscrews. “Gorinchik.” He grinned. “Say no. I would love you to say no.”

  “I don’t say no. I don’t say yes. I say you’re an idiot with balls for brains, you hulking leshy rock. Oh, I can see the moss on your bones! Who fools Zmey Gorinich? Nothing and no one! What do you think you’re doing out here? You and me, boy, we can dress ourselves up as men, we can conjugate all our verbs perfectly, and they still won’t love us. She’ll never want you smearing her tits with mud and shooting wet leaves into her. My father was more like us than any human since, and he had it right: Take them if you want them, keep the children, and eat your fill of the world. The best humans will ever give us is tribute. You ask your Koschei. He knows better than anyone. It’s them who’ve no souls and no hearts. Who makes Zmey Gorinich’s bed? Not him!”

  “I have a soul,” said Marya Morevna, and the golden faces of the Yelenas crowded her mind. “I have a heart. I don’t sleep on anyone’s bones.”

  Comrade Gorinich leered. “You’re young yet. Give it time.”

  “You were slurping bones clean long before the Party wrote them down for you,” Marya snapped. “Don’t you go drawing lines between chyerti and humans. You are hungry; we are hungry. What’s the difference?”

  “The difference is, the whole world is yours, but you keep pushing us out! It’s not enough to have the cities and the churches, have to have the farms, too. Not enough to have the farms, have to have the forests. Not enough to have the forests, have to have the snow, every flake, every crystal! And now you come demanding my gold, too, as if you have the first idea what a dragon’s treasure is, what it means. Well, I have you beat, Marya Morevna. You are already dead. But me? Zmey Gorinich survives everything. I can be a Mongol if I must. I can be Chinese, if that’s the thing to be. And I can be a good Party man without breaking a sweat. At the end of it all, come looking, and still you’ll find Gorinich swimming the ashes, sunning his belly on your skulls!”

  Zemlehyed put his cap back on and straightened it. Then, he walked quietly out the door, letting the goatskin flap fall behind him.

  “What is he doing?”

  “Go find out for yourself,” said Marya, though she had no idea.

  “I can’t, imbecile. What, you think a dragon can turn into a man? I’m too big for that! A man’s flesh is no more than a sock to me. You are so deep in my coils I can already taste you. That chair you sit in, that is also me. This desk is me, this floor, this yurt. Even a few of the flowers outside. My scales, my tongue, my crest, my stomach. I can’t walk outside myself.”

  Comrade Gorinich took off his glasses and folded them delicately. He opened his mouth horribly wide, all his flat teeth showing. Wider and wider his mouth gaped, until it fell back over his skull like a hood. Marya bolted for the door, but the air around her swelled and darkened, coils she could not see before shimmering into sight around her, as high as walls and higher, squeezing around her, vising her in. Marya tried to beat against the lizard flesh closing her up, but the coils had pinned her arms already. They reeked of rotting flesh and old marrow. She gulped for breath, her chest shallow and frantic, her head only just protruding from a nest of serpent loops the color of underground caverns, black and blue and silver. She could not see the face of Zmey Gorinich, if he had one, only his inexorably tightening body. Even Marya’s tears were strangled away.

  “Comrade Gorinich,” she whispered hoarsely, her voice squeezed away, her heartbeat jangling in her ears. “You will have me, soon enough. Your file said so, and files do not lie. You will have me for your bed of bones, and sleep on me forever. But your file does not say Comrade Marya Morevna, eaten by a Kazakh dragon in 1926! There will be discrepancies, Zmey Gorinich! And paperwork! Let me go. You will not have to wait long.” Then Marya Morevna shut her eyes. She leaned as far forward as she could, and kissed, very gently, the snake-flesh closing around her face.

  The coils flushed scalding hot, and Marya truly thought for a moment that she might die there. A tiny flame went up on her cheek, just below her eye. Her lashes began to sizzle—and then the coils were gone. She stood in a cotton field outside the yurt, bent double, chasing her breath. Marya slapped her face to put out the flame.

  “Masha!” cried Zemlehyed, farther up the meadow, at the riverbank. “Are you all right?”

  “She’s bitter and not worth eating!” bellowed a voice from within the yurt.

  Marya ran to the leshy, who had taken off his olive jacket and was sweating in his undershirt.

  “Where did you go, Zemya? He might have choked me. He might have killed me.”

  Zemlehyed wiped his forehead with one massive fist. “I am diverting this river, Marya Morevna. I am coaxing it to run into that horrid yurt, and wash him away. When he is gone, we shall be able to rifle through the wreckage for coins, white ones and black ones. It was his babbling about the Khans that gave me the idea. We did this sort of thing when they were underfoot.”

  Zemya bent by the riverbank, his huge knees popping loudly in the blue air. He gathered up a mound of earth in his arms, so much earth that great, long bones and boulders came up with it, so much that behind the mass no leshy could be seen, and flung it away from him. It exploded against a hillock in a shower of dust and broken rock. Zemlehyed winked at Marya and hopped into the hole he had made, already filling with river water. He leaned his shoulder against one side of the earthen hole and shoved, the cords of his neck taut as guitar strings. He burst through the soil and kept shoving, so fast and so far that Marya immediately lost sight of him amidst the black dirt and the river rushing to fill up the path he had made for it. By the time he reached the yurt, the river could not be stopped. He leapt up out of the foam and roaring water as the current swept over Comrade Gorinich, carrying him along with it to join another stream farther down the hill. The screeching of Zmey Gorinich echoed in the valley, but so did the laughter of Zemlehyed, who spat after him.

  Marya walked back to the place the yurt had occupied, her hair drenched with spray, her scalded face throbbing. When she reached the place the yurt had recently occupied, the river had calmed somewhat, and Zemya was picking through the grass, looking for gold.

  “There’s nothing here, Zemya,” sighed Marya. “Not even bones. Look, everywhere there is nothing but cotton plants!”

  Marya laid her head on one side. She scrambled over to a clutch of cotton, pale wisps blowing lightly in the hot wind. She snapped off one of the fluffy white heads. She knew it, she knew the riddle, and triumph made her scalp tingle.

  “Oh, Zemya! I see it now. Do you see it? White gold. Comrade Gorinich was right to laugh at us, begging for coins.” She turned the blossom over in her hand. “And the black must be—”

  “Oil,” finished Zemlehyed.

  Marya frowned. “But I have no equipment to fish up oil from the earth. Perhaps there are barrels somewhere. Perhaps there is a drill, in the hills.”

  Zemlehyed grinned again, his beard glittering with sweat and river water. He drew up one ponderous arm and, with a yell, brought it crashing down against the earth. It gave way, and the leshy sank into the ground up to his shoulders. His face creased as though he were groping in a barrel for herring. Finally, with a cry of strain, he pulled his fist back up again. It overflowed with black ichor, thick, reeking. Zemya sat down heavily, panting, pollen spinning about his head.

  And in the dimming, bleeding light, Marya Morevna knelt at his side, put her hands on his broad cheeks, and kissed the leshy just as the first star came on in the sky. It was a real kiss, a deep one, and she meant it.

  When she pulled away, Zemlehyed’s craggy face was wet with tears.

  “Remember this when you are queen,” he whispered hoarsely. “I moved the earth and the water for you.”

  * * *

  Chairman Yaga crooked her braided eyebrow at the lump of black muck and the cotton flower on her desk. The magician
s’ cafe bustled and buzzed beyond her door. She stuck her finger in the oil and licked it experimentally.

  “Low-grade.” She snorted.

  Marya said nothing. Yaga would accept it.

  “Look at you, all full of yourself, thinking two out of three makes you a somebody! Tscha, you are still nobody. The last is hardest—that’s the rule—and you’ll never pull it off.”

  “I will, though.”

  “Have you decided that you forgive Koschei his girlfriends, then?”

  Marya chewed the inside of her cheek. “It is better,” she said slowly, only realizing she told the truth as she said it, “to store up all one’s advantages before one moves. I will have your blessing in my holster before I say one word to him, Chairman Yaga.”

  Yaga lit up a cigarillo, blowing a fat ring at her bookshelf. “I see my extremely expensive games are not a complete waste. And you’re at least a bit interesting now, with that fancy scar to remember me by.” Comrade Gorinich’s burning skin had left its mark under her eye, a diamond-shaped blister that nearly cut her lower lid in half. Even when it healed, she would look as though she were weeping gunpowder, weeping wounds. “But it doesn’t matter. Having a brain like a potato and a sweet little civilized cunt that minds its own business, you’ve no hope of besting my last.”

  Chairman Yaga gestured toward the window with her cigarillo. “You see my friend out there?”

  Marya looked, expecting the car with chicken legs to be there, hooting at stray cats. But outside, in the thick snow and shadows of the endless winter evening, sat a great marble mortar, red as slaughter, bigger than a horse, its pestle slowly grinding around the bowl.

  “Ride him. Take him all the way to the northern borders of Buyan, to the spot where the fern flowers grow. There is a cave there, in the cliffside, and in the cave, a chest. Bring me what you find there. My mortar, he won’t make it easy. But you will learn to master him, break him, make him obey you.” Yaga sighed, blowing smoke. “Or you won’t. I can’t teach you about mastery, kid; you either have it or you don’t. And if you don’t, well, you might as well climb into a stove now—your husband will burn you up to keep himself warm, sooner or later.” Baba Yaga beckoned to Marya and patted her lap. Under her black fur she wore a leather apron like a butcher or a blacksmith.

  Marya recoiled. “I don’t want to sit on your lap. I’m not a child.”

  “The littlest fly on a lump of goat shit interests me more than what you want.”

  Marya grimaced, crossed the room, and sat, gingerly, clenching her jaw, on Chairman Yaga’s lap. The crone cupped her face like her own grandmother.

  “If you think my brother is any different, girl, then there’s no help for you. He’ll burn you down like wax if you let him. You’ll think it’s love, while he dines on your heart. And maybe it will be. But he’s so hungry, he’ll eat you all in one sitting, and you’ll be in his belly, and what will you do then? Hear me say it, because I know. I ate all of my husbands. First I ate their love, then their will, then their despair, and then I made pies out of their bodies—and those bodies were so dear to me! But marriage is war, and you do what you must to survive—because only one of you will.”

  Marya swallowed hard. “I’m not like that,” she whispered.

  “We’ll see. When you’re flying along in a mortar and pestle with the moon screaming in your ear, and you look so much like me no man could tell us apart, we’ll see what you’re like. Only one thing matters, almost-soup: Who is to rule.”

  12

  Red Compels

  “No,” said Madame Lebedeva, dipping her finger into a pot of powder the color of amber. It matched both her teapot and her tea. With a deft movement she swept it over one eyelid and inspected her work in the tall, iron-rimmed mirror of her vanity. A gauzy white skirt fluttered at her ankles; a severe blouse gathered its lace around her throat, pinned by her cameo. Her snowy hair rippled in smooth finger-curls, drawn up into a cascading mass of feathers and pearls. The image on her cameo also had such curls, such feathers and pearls.

  “What do you mean, no?” said Marya. Her friend’s denial stung—for all her haughtiness, Lebedeva refused her so little.

  “I mean I don’t do that sort of thing.”

  “What sort of thing?”

  Lebedeva sighed and put down her pink cake-icing rouge with the loud smack of metal against enamel.

  “What do you think, Masha? The sort of thing where you come to me with some kind of impossible task oddly suited to my particular talents that simply must be completed and Oh, Lebed, darling, help me in my hour of need! I don’t do that. I don’t drink the ocean so you can fetch a ring from the bottom of it, I don’t stay awake for three days to glimpse a snotty little tsarevna traipsing off to who-knows-where, and I certainly don’t mess about with a mortar that never troubled me.”

  Madame Lebedeva perused her armory of lipstick and snapped one up decisively, the color of a peony seen through layers of ice.

  “What’s eating you? Naganya and Zemlehyed came with me; they helped me. If I fail, Chairman Yaga will have me in her pot.”

  “Naganya and Zemlehyed are your companions, Marya.”

  Marya warmed a little with embarrassment. She began to feel she had behaved poorly, somehow. “And what are you?”

  The pale lady turned incredulously from her mirror. “I am Inna Affanasievna Lebedeva! I am a vila and a magician and I am not your servant, Marya Morevna! What have you done for me except refuse my advances and mock my concerns because they are not your concerns, because you think cosmetics and fashion and society frivolous? What regard have you shown me but to decline my offers of badly needed instruction and allow your other friends to tread on my pride? When have I come to you saying, Masha, help me curse this cattle, help me woo that shepherd for my amusement! I keep to my affairs, which are not your affairs!”

  And Marya Morevna knew she had behaved poorly, and was deathly sorry. She could not bear for a beautiful blond girl to speak harshly to her; it pained her in her throat, where a red scarf once lay. “Oh, Lebed! I did not mean to insult you!”

  The vila sighed, pinching her cheeks until they got pink and bright. “That is your nature. You may not be a Yelena, but you are a kind of cousin to them. And your sort does not treat my sort well. So no, I will not help you ride the mortar. I certainly don’t wish you eaten, darling; it isn’t that. But I have my pride. Some days, Masha, when I have not made a cikavac and the cafe turns me away at the door; when shepherds shriek and show me the sign of the cross; when Naganya sleeps in your bed and my lover has left me for a bitch rusalka who is only going to drown him, and it serves him right; it’s all I have. And you laugh at me because I try to teach you about lipstick.”

  “Well, you must admit, when placed alongside the threat of becoming soup, lipstick is rather silly.”

  Madame Lebedeva stared at Marya until Marya felt her cheeks burn and her black blister flare painfully.

  “Do you think I am a fool, Masha? All this time, and you speak to me as though I were a flighty pinprick of a girl. I am a magician! Did you never think, even once, that I loved lipstick and rouge for more than their color alone? I am a student of their lore, and it is arcane and hermetic beyond the dreams of alchemists. Did you never wonder why I gave you so many pots, so many creams, so much perfume?” Lebedeva’s eyes shone. “Masha, listen to me. Cosmetics are an extension of the will. Why do you think all men paint themselves when they go to fight? When I paint my eyes to match my soup, it is not because I have nothing better to do than worry over trifles. It says, I belong here, and you will not deny me. When I streak my lips red as foxgloves, I say, Come here, male. I am your mate, and you will not deny me. When I pinch my cheeks and dust them with mother-of-pearl, I say, Death, keep off, I am your enemy, and you will not deny me. I say these things, and the world listens, Masha. Because my magic is as strong as an arm. I am never denied.”

  Marya’s unpainted lips parted in surprise.

  “I did not know.
”

  “You did not ask.”

  “Please help me, Inna Affanasievna.” Marya took the vila’s pale, soft hands in hers. “Please.”

  “Every once in a while, my darling sister, you must do something for yourself.”

  Marya looked at Madame Lebedeva—her deep amber eyelids, her pale lips, her frosted cheeks. She could hardly stand the beauty of her friend. It dazzled her. She did not think she could deny Madame Lebedeva, either.

  “Will you paint me then, for this task? Will you make up my face, as you have so often asked to do?”

  Madame Lebedeva frowned. Her pearly lips turned downward, and she seemed a space older.

  “No, Mashenka. I will not. It would only be an extension of my will, and it is yours that is at issue. But I will say to you: Blue is for cruel bargains; green is for daring what you oughtn’t; violet is for brute force. I will say to you: Coral coaxes; pink insists; red compels. I will say to you: You are dear to me as attar of roses. Please do not get eaten.”

  Madame Lebedeva leaned forward on her little gold stool and kissed Marya on both cheeks, eyelashes gently fluttering against Marya’s temples. She smelled like rain falling through honeysuckles, and when she drew away, her kisses remained on Marya’s skin, little twin circles of pink, almost invisible.

  “Remember this when you are queen,” she breathed. “I told you my secrets.”

  * * *

  A bashful winter’s noontime showed only its modest ankle before slipping into darkness again. Marya walked along Skorohodnaya Road, kicking clumps of ice. Mastery, she thought. I know nothing of that. Who was master when Koschei fed me and silenced me? Not I. An explosion of laughter spilled out of a tavern with eaves of black braids that hung down the corners like bellpulls. Marya stopped and stroked the building’s wall: pale, smooth skin, too hairless to be anything but a girl’s. The building shivered with the attention. And yet, I chose to be silent, to eat what he fed me. And he shook when he touched me. I made him weak enough to shake. What does any of it mean?