Deathless

by Catherynne Valente

  Marya stopped and turned up her face to the stars, which sparkled like the points of knives. She turned up the collar of her long coat; the wound below her eye pulsed in the cold. She thought of the year that had turned since she had come to Buyan, how she had trembled when she first saw the Chernosvyat, the fountains of warm blood even now gurgling behind her, Naganya’s fearful clicking laugh. Nineteen forty-two, she thought. At Leningrad. It was the at that made her shudder. Not in Leningrad. At Leningrad. At least I shall die at home. But did he really say I would die? He said gross desertion. I will be a deserter. Same as a runaway, really. And what is home? Buyan is home. Leningrad is so far; 1942 is so far. Why would I ever go back?

  “Volchya-Yagoda,” she whispered, reaching into the wind for something familiar, something huge and kind.

  “Yes, Marya,” said the voice of the horse, beside her in a moment as though he had always been there, breathing against her shoulder. He glowed milky in the night.

  “I wondered, if I wanted you, if you would come.”

  “I would not call it a rule. But I have very good ears, and I am fast.”

  Marya turned and put her arms around the horse’s long neck. He did not smell of horse, but of exhaust and metal.

  “Promise me, Volchya. Promise that you will never take me back to Leningrad. If I do not go back, I cannot die there.”

  “Did someone say you were going to die?”

  Marya’s brow furrowed. “Well, no, not exactly. He said convicted. But convicted usually means died.”

  “Perhaps it will not be so bad.”

  “Volchya, you must swear it. What do horses swear on?”

  “Nothing.” Volchya spoke with a strange accent, his brassy deep voice pinched and contorted. “Horses are godless. There is only the rider, and the whip. But I promise.”

  “Take me home, Volchya.”

  The bone-pale horse crouched down and wriggled within Marya’s embrace so that she found herself swept up onto his back before she could breathe twice. She could feel his oily blood churning hot and heavy beneath her. He turned toward the Chernosvyat, a dark blot against the dark sky. In the torchlight, the shadows of his bones moved under his thin skin.

  “Why do you let me ride you? Are you more tame than Chairman Yaga’s mortar?”

  Volchya-Yagoda snorted. “That thing is a dish. It has no mouth, no teeth. You cannot call something living if it has no mouth. Many things in Buyan are mixed-up and backwards—mossy rocks and guns that speak, birds that turn into men and buildings like youths—but you will notice that everything living has a mouth. Mouths bite and swallow; they talk; they taste. They kiss. A mouth is the main tool for living. The mortar is like a very vicious spaniel. It is alive in some sense, but you wouldn’t set it a place at dinner.” His hoofbeats echoed in the darkness. “As for why I let you ride me, ah, what a terrible science, riding and being ridden! Which is the servant: the one who bears his mistress, or the one who combs and brushes her mount? It is simple, Marya Morevna. You served me when first we met. You polished my skin and gave me new shoes. You slept against my flank. Service buys service. In my four hearts, service is the only possible expression of love. I serve Koschei. But if you had not run your hand along my fetlock, I would never have served you.” Volchya-Yagoda turned his gaunt head to nip at her. It hurt, but she took it as it was meant, gently, with affection. “But that will not work with the mortar, you know. It is a kitchen beast. You could not make yourself so low as to serve it, not if you crawled on your belly. And Yaga’s tests never measure the length of your humility. It wants force, Marya. It wants you to be bigger than it is. It wants a mistress, and it is accustomed to one who is ancient and strong, whose thighs can crush it between them, whose iron hips drive it home. You will never manage it.”

  “Everyone is so sure I cannot do it.”

  “Oh, Marya, of course you can’t! Even after a year with us you are gentle and kind yet! A little wilder, perhaps, more keen to bite and be bitten, to steal and fight, but how warm you are still. How willing to do as you are told. That is no girl to ride the mortar. You do not have it in you. Come, I will take you to the north wall. You can fetch her bauble, and no one will be wiser.”

  Marya shook her head. “She needs only to ask the mortar and I will be caught.”

  “I told you, it has no mouth to betray you.”

  Marya frowned deeply. She wanted it to be that easy. To be helped along. So much nicer to be helped along. But Madame Lebedeva’s voice sounded in her: Every once in a while, my darling sister, you must do something for yourself.

  “The task is not the bauble, it is the mortar,” she sighed finally. “Take me to my tower, Volchya. That’s all. I must find the way myself.”

  They rode in silence for a long while. Skorohodnaya Road stretched out like a black ribbon, the great pendant of the moon sliding down its center.

  “Volchya-Yagoda, may I ask you a last thing?”

  The great horse sighed. “You want answers like oats in a feedbag, Marya.”

  “I have spoken with domoviye and leshy and Zmey Gorinich himself, and all of them call themselves loyal; they love the Party like a mother. They recite back to me the slogans of my childhood, and their eyes shine with fierceness. And yet Koschei lives in his great palace and Lebedeva hoards her night creams and her cameos and prizes her patronymic. Little folk scramble to wear badges of belonging on their breasts, to agitate and join up, but big folk live as they always have, like dragons, like Tsars. How can this be?”

  Volchya-Yagoda considered. “Is it not so in your world?”

  “I suppose. But such things upset people. We hold demonstrations and civil wars when inequities are discovered.”

  The stallion snorted, and his breath curled in the cold. “Marya Morevna, we are better at this than you are. We can hold two terrible ideas at once in our hearts. Never have your folk delighted us more, been more like family. For a devil, hypocrisy is a parlor game, like charades. Such fun, and when the evening is done we shall be holding our bellies to keep from dying of laughter.”

  * * *

  Marya did not light her lamps. Her eyes moved fondly over her red room, turned black by the moon and shadows. She trailed her hands over her things: a brocade chair, the curtained bed all full of silky, bristling furs, her silver writing desk, a firebird’s flaming quill, burning dimly as it slept. Somewhere, a beast missed that feather. Marya regretted suddenly that she had never written anything at that desk, not even a letter home, to her sisters at their marriage-hearths. Not even a poem. Her fingers, hunting and purposeful though her heart drooped hopelessly, found her vanity and its tall mirror, the pots and boxes and brushes Lebedeva had given her on every holiday with calligraphed cards abjuring her to enter the world of grown women and all their secret privileges.

  Marya Morevna sat at her mirror, as lightly as in dreams. Her hands fluttered over the array of cosmetics as though they played a harpsichord. The pots brimmed with colors that made her heart swim, creamy, untouched swirls of oxblood and peacock indigo and a pink like a kitten’s paw.

  I shall be red as slaughter, as the stone of the mortar, she thought. She collected her memories of Lebedeva’s toilet like cards in her heart: how she had done it, the strokes of her pale hands, the order in which the vila had painted her face. First the powder, like snow, swept over her cheeks and brow with a heavy puff of ram fleece. Then to line her eyes. Marya chose a tiny carved pot of gold pigment, like an icon, a saint’s eyes. Each of her lashes she lined in silver, the wetness of it cool and slippery on her skin. Then she took up a thin boar’s-hair brush and dipped it in crimson, carnelian dust. Under her brow bone she drew a long red line, and over her lids she drew a darker scarlet still, like the blood that pools at the bottom of a heart. Red compels. She pinched her cheeks and rubbed a shiny ruby-bronze cream into them. The lips came last—the mouth that Volchya-Yagoda said was the tool of the living. She found among the forest of lipsticks a fearful autumnal shade, like fire, like dying
leaves.

  Marya looked at herself in the glass, still herself but girded, made more terrible, older. She had not managed it all flawlessly, as Lebedeva would have done. Her face was a little wild, a little ragged, the lines around her eyes wobbling, the colors too bright, unblended, unsubtle, as if an old woman’s weak eyes and shaking fingers had drawn them. Marya raised up her hands and folded her long black hair into a savagely tight chignon, so tight the pins that held it drew tiny drops of blood from her scalp. In the night, with the moon so high and quiet all around her, she knew the rest like a poem recited. Laughing with Naganya in the sunlight, she could never have thought of it. But the night, close around and heavy, guided her steps, her choices. She went to her closet and drew out a leather apron she’d gotten in summer, when Zemya had decided her arms were too skinny and taught her to beat out fireplace pokers from bubbling iron. It was so heavy, its straps weighting her down, digging into her neck, her waist. Oh, I will be sorry, she thought as she pulled on her thickest, blackest fur and closed it over the apron. Into her pockets she gathered the dry duck bones of last night’s supper, still resting on their ivory tray. Onto her throat went a daub of resinous myrrh and a splash of vodka from a crystal bottle.

  Marya Morevna did not want to look in her mirror again. She feared what waited in the glass. But she crept up on herself, and dragged up her eyes to see. How broad her chest, suddenly; how dark and squared her shoulders. How the fur brushed her pale chin; how severe her hair and dark lips looked!

  “I am Marya Morevna, daughter of twelve mothers, and I will not be denied,” she whispered to the girl in the mirror.

  * * *

  Far below, on the snowy street, the red mortar waited, impatient, steaming in the winter night.

  It snuffled the black air and purred in its odd way: The black pestle ground slowly, with satisfaction, around the bowl of the mortar. Ah! There is the smell of old bones and embalming spices that is my mistress! It jumped up, thrilling to her nearness, stamping deep circles in the snow. Ah! There is the black coat and flapping leather apron that is my mistress! The mortar began to spin with anticipation. Ah! There is the bloody mouth, fresh from a husband, and that means my mistress!

  But the mortar hopped fretfully back and forth, out of reach. It smelled youth, too, under the old bones and spilled liquor, and the dark figure did not seem big enough, and her hair was black where it should have been white.

  The dark, fur-swaddled figure walked up to the uncertain mortar. Without a moment’s hesitation, she snarled and slapped the mortar hard across its belly.

  “Let me up, you ugly teacup!” she growled, pitching her voice low and rough.

  The mortar exulted. There is the rough hand and cruel words that my mistress owns! It tipped forward onto its face, abject, so that its beloved witch Yaga could climb in.

  But as soon as it scooped her up, the mortar knew it had accepted an impostor. My mistress weighs more than three bakers who gobble their own bread! Out, out, tiny liar!

  * * *

  Marya’s feet slipped and skidded in the concave bowl, scrabbling for purchase. The mortar spun and lurched, trying to spill her out. It bucked, reared. It launched up into the air, flipped itself and slammed sharply down in the snow three times—but still Marya clung to the pestle, gritting her teeth, clawing at the smooth stone with her fingernails until they snapped and bled. When the mortar had gotten itself right side up again, she straddled the pestle between her legs like a broomstick, her knees knocking gently into the smooth grooves where Baba Yaga’s knees were accustomed to resting. The stone seethed, hot as a stove bottom, pulsing as though blood moved through it. Marya Morevna drove into it with her knees, her bones grinding painfully down against it, but still the mortar protested, trying to bounce hard enough to bash her head into its sides.

  Marya wrapped one arm around the pestle, her thighs squeezing the trunk of it, and dug in her pocket. Hauling out a dried duck leg, she rolled it against the bowl of the mortar, to give the beast the scent of fatty, rich fowl, and then flung it down Skorohodnaya as hard as she could. The mortar leapt, ravenous, and hopped after it, up into the air and down again, leaving a trail of wide, deep stampings in the snow behind it, like an endless ellipsis.

  Between her legs, the pestle rattled and shuddered, whipping her around the bowl. Pain flared white and black everywhere she slammed into stone, and then again, when her bruises got bruised.

  “North, trash heap!” she hissed at the mortar, broadening her voice, shredding it. The mortar paused, confused again by her voice, which would never be as broad or shredded as its owner’s. Marya Morevna breathed deep, the stabbing cold flowing through her. I am not so stupid that I do not listen to you, Chairman Yaga! I know what this is about! She bore down on the pestle, letting it press lasciviously against her, its pulsating heat suffusing through her legs, her belly. She ground her bones against the thing, circling her hips, pushing at it, coaxing. She opened her legs wider, until it felt like a part of her, a stone Marya jutting out awkwardly from her body, swollen and wild. She swiveled herself so that the pestle pointed north and thrust forward. The mortar spun once more, in joy, thrilling to her touch—this was right, this was what it knew!—and bolted north, through the dark and the ice.

  The wind cut right through her, lifting her chest out toward the starry trees. A kind of awful pleasure sliced through her: the pine air and the freezing moonlight; the warm, leaping pestle beneath her; and the soft pocking sounds of the mortar stamping the snow. All the small beasts of the forest shrank away from the road and the screaming laughter of Marya Morevna as the starlight whipped her red cheeks. She rode the mortar and pestle like a savage thing, ripping through the night.

  * * *

  The northern boundary of Buyan flows over a hilly, snowbound country. The earth there has never yet seen the sun. All year the ice crowds close around the three or four grass seeds that valiantly pray for the coming of light. Once, the leshiyi built a wall through the winter, so that the northern sea would know it was forbidden here. But like all stones touched by leshiyi, the wall sighed and dreamed and wished for more than it had, and all the while, silently grew. Now, only an archaeologist might be able to guess that the purple-black cliff with a dozen goats gnawing at its roof was once a wall, could see the old, vague shapes of bricks in the foot of the cliff. Could pick out the crack of a cavern, where the wall’s watchtower was once kept, from which alarms once rang down the valleys, rung by some mossy, granite-heavy soul.

  The mortar, no archaeologist, but afflicted with a kind of dumb sympathy for the old wall, stone to stone, brought Marya Morevna right to the cavern, little more than a slit in the rock, like the thin triangle of darkness between the pages of a book left facedown on a white table. The mortar stomped three times in the snow and tipped forward, spilling Marya out into the tamped circle of firm snow in the midst of soft, hushed drifts. The pestle rolled around the bowl, purring, begging for approval. Marya thought of kissing it, but knew Chairman Yaga would not grace her beast so. She gave it another hard smack instead. The mortar snapped back upright, spinning in rapture.

  Snowflakes blew into the crevice; three winds skipped in, howling hollow and hoarse. Marya Morevna’s black fur glittered, nearly white with clumps of ice. She ducked into the cave mouth, her skin still flushed from the riding, her breath steaming in the stony closet. The ceiling drooped low, stalagmites like drops of spittle teetering above her head as the floor sloped down, down, into the dark. How can I find a chest in all this blackness? Marya despaired, her hands groping in front of her, clutching at shadows.

  “Haroo, Grandmother!” growled someone invisible, somewhere beyond Marya’s grasp. “Why do you stumble about so? Are you drunk again?”

  “Gahvoo!” another raspy voice howled. “Someday you’ll sprout gills and learn to breathe vodka. And then we will miss you!”

  “Guff, guff,” grumbled a third. “I shall light you a match on my teeth.” A phosphor-flash sparked, turning the cave w
alls green and white.

  Four dogs panted amiably before Marya, their paws huge and bony in the ghostlight: a proud wolf slowly beating her thick tail against the cave floor; a starved racing hound licking his chops; a haughty lapdog, his curled fur fringing his face like a little mane; and a fat spotted sheepdog, her chin resting on two pillars of congealed saliva like long, thick teeth. Marya sucked in her breath. Behind them sat a glass chest, frosted over, glittering.

  “Rup, rup!” yipped the lapdog. “You’re looking very fine tonight, Grandmother! Why, you’ve hardly any warts at all! Bathing in blood again, I’ll warrant. Virgins or capitalists this time?”

  Marya could feel her eyeliner sticky around her lashes, her hair half-loose from its bun. I must look frightful—but then, frightful is what they expect. What they want.

  “Virgins,” she snarled. The fat sheepdog leaned forward on her pillars of spit, which wobbled like jelly.

  “Guff, guff! Your voice is so strong and loud, Grandmother!” she whined. “Last time you visited, you sounded like you’d swallowed six knives! How’d you get it so sweet?”

  Marya bit her lip. “I, er, I drank up a songbird’s soul,” she barked. “Just cracked open her little chest and sucked the song right up, like marrow through a bone!” After a moment, she added, “As if it’s any of your business!”

  “Haroo, Grandmother,” howled the wolf, her eyes round and cunning. “Your skin is so soft and smooth! Last time you visited, you looked like a crumpled page! You had more spots than a toadstool! How did you get it so supple?”

  “Comrade Stalin’s wife is nursing!” Marya hissed, warming to her pantomime. She spat onto the floor of the cave for good measure. “I snuck into her room in the night and squeezed her teats out into a tub until I could swim in her milk and rub it into my skin like night cream! Tired out that old cow so she could hardly walk in the morning!” After a moment, she added, “You mangy old bitch!”