Deathless

by Catherynne Valente

  Marya Morevna kept silent. She could think of only one thing; her whole mind clutched it: What do you look like without your face? Who are you, husband? I will see it. I will.

  “Because she knows how I did it to myself. You would not think it of her, that she could be tender. But we were so young then, and there is a kind of understanding between brothers and sisters. A history shared. I will not tell you, my love. You are what you are and I think you might try it, just to show me you could. I will say it was something like how you came here with me, and something like letting a wolf eat my liver every day for a thousand years, and something like slowly suffocating in a gas the color of jaundice, and something like dying every second, to avoid ever dying. There is still a place in me, Masha, where my death once lay. I have a pain there, the way some men feel their legs long after they’ve been cut off at the knee. It is my pain, and I cannot share it. I would not, even if I could. I will age with you, if it will please you. I will match you, wrinkle for wrinkle, grey hair for grey hair, creak for creak, tumor for tumor. You will be so beautiful when you are old.”

  “Death hath no dominion,” said Ivan, and both Marya and Koschei turned to stare at the young man as if he had appeared out of nowhere. Marya’s attention was a cat’s attention, now. Whatever she wanted most held her utterly, so that she abandoned emphatically anything other than the object of her fixation. And then something new would appear and she clapped it with the same impenetrable stare. She knew herself, how she had slowly, over years, become a cat, a wolf, a snake, anything but a girl. How she had wrung out her girlhood like a death. And now Ivan sat there, studiously not eating his bread smeared thickly with butter, waiting for her attention, her regard, but she could forget him in a moment if Koschei pulled her towards him like a little moon, and she knew it, and she felt herself splitting and tearing between them, her human heart, her demon heart.

  “Well said,” Koschei allowed him, generosity coating his words. “Please, boy, eat. I promise, no one will appear and cackle at you that you must now stay here six months of the year. You must be starving for a glistening bit of meat.”

  Ivan stared at the butter, how it shone. “You said this was the devil’s country.”

  “So I did. Then I must be the devil. And she the devil’s bride. Aren’t you lucky, to have fallen in with such exciting people?”

  Marya tried to help him. She remembered when this was hard. “He’s only teasing you, Ivan.”

  Koschei snarled suddenly, his lips drawing back from sharp and suddenly yellowish, blackened teeth. He threw his goblet against the wall. It did not shatter, but thudded heavily to the floor.

  “Not that name,” he growled. “Not in my house. Call him something else, if you insist on dragging home strays.”

  Marya rose from his lap, her loose hair falling towards his face like a leash. He would deny her, no matter what he said. She did not feel a pain where his denial sat, not anymore. In fact, Marya did not feel much of anything besides want, an endless want that coiled in her, that lashed out for Koschei, for wine and goose and melon, for the hilt of her bone rifle. The want survived any fight, with her fists, with her guns. It was a wolf, tenacious. It had swallowed up Ivan Nikolayevich. She could not remember, now, ever having felt happy or sad. Only hungry. Only empty, and greedy, and insatiable. It was as though she had never taken off that leather apron, that black fur coat, that terrible red paint.

  Koschei kept her hand, tight in his cold fist.

  “Don’t leave me,” he said helplessly. “No rules but that rule. Don’t leave me.”

  * * *

  Koschei the Deathless allowed Ivan to sleep in Marya’s house. He liked to show magnanimity. He liked to be expansive, so long as he didn’t really have to share in the end. Thus Marya was not surprised when he caught her by a length of hair and drew her back to him once Ivan’s golden head had disappeared down the hall of the Chernosvyat. He wound her hair in his hand, running his thumb over it.

  “All my onyxes, my agates, my obsidian. All my black treasures in this one strand,” Koschei murmured. “How long your hair has grown. You could strangle a man in it.”

  Marya took her hair from his fist and lifted it, heavy as a rope, twisting it around his neck, bringing his face close to hers. He smelled like barley and old trees. But then, maybe he smelled that way only because it pleased her. Marya Morevna shivered in her husband’s arms. He pressed his forehead to hers, shutting his long-lashed eyes.

  “You should go with him,” Koschei whispered harshly, “when he asks you. You should go, and have his babies and kiss their wounds and teach them to read.”

  “You don’t mean that.” The air between them was thick, knotted.

  “I don’t mean it.” He pushed her back, away from the black feast table, against a long, broad wall all covered in silver tapestries showing peacocks and apples and archangels with long teeth. Save for the long chains hanging from the eyes of one peacock’s tail. “I don’t mean it. Stay with me forever, forever, until you die, and then, still, I will keep your bones and clutch them to my breast.” He lifted one of her arms and clapped it into the chain. Marya knew those chains. She owned them, had tamed them. Though she wanted to speak plainly, calmly, her heart leapt as the locks caught. Her breath found itself. She searched his eyes, ducking her head to catch his gaze.

  “Koschei, it’s me. Your Masha, your Marousha. What do I want with wounded babies?”

  He bound up her other arm against the silver brocade, and Marya hung there, helpless. But her blood and her wanting lashed themselves, and of all the times she had hung against Koschei’s wall, she knew that this time she was not helpless at all. His fear wrote itself on every familiar angle of his face.

  “But if you go with him, you will not be safe. Viy will not always respect our treaties. The accords only keep you alive—they do not keep you happy, or unmaimed, or those you love anything near safe. I bargained for you, not for any other. If you leave me, he will come for you one day with silver shears, and you will fall. If he were not a coward and bound by me, he would have done it already.”

  “You do not need to send me away for my own good like a child. I chose to fight, and I still choose it.” But as she said it Marya Morevna knew she lied. She wanted an end to war. An end to cold and blackness and half the road gone silver with death.

  Koschei went to an armoire and took out a long birch branch, white and thin.

  “I meant to give you a life of greed and plenty,” he said, moving the branch over the tops of her breasts. “I wanted to keep you innocent, so that I would always have your purity to eat, every breakfast and every supper. You can be innocent again. It’s not true, what they say, that you can never get it back. You can. It’s only that most folk cannot be bothered.” Koschei the Deathless hooked his fingers into the glittering neckline of her dress and tore it with deliberation, down to the hem. Tiny gems clattered to the floor. Marya shut her eyes; her body arched toward him, the little striped animal that it had become, desperate and starving, always. This, this kept her here. Alive, aflame. At the end of fighting this wall, this man, these chains woke her heart again.

  “You should go with him. He will ask tonight, I think. I would ask tonight. There is a reason they all leave me for Ivans. I can never be an Ivan. I can never roll with you in the sun like a mindless golden pup. I am too old for it, for warmth and simplicity. I burn, I freeze; I am never warm. I am rigid; I forgot softness because it did not serve me.” He brought the branch down against her breasts, and the sear of it tore a cry from her. She felt her skin rising up into a scarlet welt, the molten fire of the pain showing on her flesh. Yes, I am still alive, she thought. “When I say forever,” Koschei whispered, “I mean until the black death of the world. An Ivan means just the present moment, the flickering light of it, in a green field, his mouth on yours. He means the stretching of that moment. But forever isn’t bright; it isn’t like that. Forever is cold and hard and final.” He lashed her again, across her stomach
, and she smiled, arching her back to receive the next blow on her hip bones, the seeping fire of it churning, unbearable. For a moment Marya did remember being happy and sad, the pleasure of roe and pickled melons, the night in the bathhouse when she was so ill. Koschei brought down the branch again and again on her belly, and she understood. That belly, which could bear children for an Ivan but never for him, that made her different than him, that made her human, not chyerti.

  Tears streamed down Marya Morevna’s face. She chased after her breath, caught it, calmed it, and Koschei paused, his head hung low as an old wolf.

  “Koschei, Koschei,” she whispered. “What would I have been if I had never seen the birds? I am no one; I am nothing. I am a blank paper on which you and your magic wrote a girl. Just the kind of girl you wanted, all hungry and hurt and needing. A machine for loving you. Nothing in me was not made by you. I was six when the rook came—six! That’s my whole life that you’ve bent in your hands. What could I have grown up to be? What kind of human woman, what kind of simple, happy thing? If I had never been broken on a bird’s wing. If I had never seen the world naked. I want to be myself again. I want to be six. I want to stop knowing everything I know. Ivan looks like the life that you stole from me.”

  And the Tsar of Life roared with agony, shaking his head from side to side like a bull. He struck the wall with his fist, and black dust crumbled from the crater it made. He bit the long neck of Marya Morevna, but she did not bleed. Her skin had hardened, become strong, become impenetrable. And she could not help thinking, How many times have you played this scene, old man? It’s new and raw for me, but not for you, no.

  “If I go with him,” she said, her voice low and shaking with the thing she did not want to say but had to, “will you put me in the factory with the Yelenas?” But what she truly asked him was forgiveness, some forgiveness for her greatest failure, that she had done nothing for the Yelenas, that the war had distracted her and she had failed, had been faithless, had abandoned them because her friends were dead and her goodness broken.

  Koschei dropped the branch quietly and put his hands over his face. For a moment, Marya thought he wept. But then he snarled and bellowed and leapt on her with such a ferocity she thought he might bite her in half. He tore at his own clothes and pushed her legs apart until her hips groaned, entering her with no gentleness, but as a king enters an enemy hall. He climbed her body and clawed at it, and Marya shook violently, in pleasure, in pain, in fear of him, in adoration.

  “Yes,” he growled, “yes, I will put you there and turn out the light in your eyes and come to stare at you for centuries, to pore over you, because you are mine, my treasure, my hoard, and I cannot keep you and I cannot let you go.”

  He thrust against her over and over, his growls echoing. At the last moment, crying out into her like a broken thing, Marya saw his face wither for a moment, becoming impossibly old, old as stone, his hair white, his eyes sunken into a bleached skull, only his teeth remaining, sharp and cruel and ready.

  18

  What We Carry Between Us

  Once, two years, two months, and two days after her wedding day, after three funerals with brown, green, and white coffins, after the battle of the Chernosvyat, in which Marya was wounded in the left thigh and the whole of the north tower withered, died, and sprang up silver in Viy’s possession, Marya Morevna had gone to visit the factory. She crept through the streets of Buyan at night and looked neither at the dead fishmongers sitting on their morbid stoop, smoking and drinking dust from crystal glasses, nor at the tavern she had once loved, now washed in silver, full of ghosts singing revolutionaries’ songs. They were part of the other Buyan now, and she could not bear to listen, even if it were at all safe to let one eye slip sideways, to look into the windows of the dead city.

  Marya remembered the way. The path burned in her memory, phosphor popping and hissing. How much easier, with a straight back free of a cackling rider. The bone door, the sound of clicking looms within. The moon moved in the sky like a railway car, and the young bride slipped inside, onto the great iron balcony she had shared with Baba Yaga in another lifetime, when she did not know the color of a dead man’s blood. Green globes lit the place: the broad, tiled floor; the long, thin windows; the stacks of finished cloth snipers and infantry and cavalry officers with organdy horses in the corners. Even in the dregs of the night, brightness touched the head of every Yelena, dozens of them, heads bent to leaping shuttles, hurtling looms. Marya climbed down the iron staircase, her heart in her throat. No one marked her. No one looked up. She could not see a foreman, though every few moments, small breaths interrupted the clacking of the machines as a girl blew into one of the cloth soldiers and the cloth soldier took his or her first breath, which was really that poor Yelena’s breath, traveling from cuff to mouth.

  Marya Morevna crouched down at the side of one of the women. Her hair, brown as good walnuts, was braided into a circle at the nape of her slender neck, and her fingers moved so fast, so terribly fast! She already had half a girl’s torso finished, her darned arm clutching a sniper’s rifle. The Yelena—or was she a rare Vasilisa? Marya could not be sure—did not turn her head. Her eyes were filmed with milky gold, her irises invisible, and she never blinked, not once.

  “Yelena,” Marya whispered. “Is your name Yelena?”

  The girl kept weaving, her fingers flashing like fish darting under water. Marya touched her arm. Her skin was warm. “Yelena?”

  The milky gold caul over her eyes swirled and shifted, but the girl did not speak.

  “Oh, please wake up. Please!” Impulsively, having not the smallest idea why, Marya rose a little and kissed the girl on the temple. Marya’s lips pressed on the girl’s warm, soft skin, her fine, downy wisps of hair. Wasn’t that how you woke up a sleeping princess? “Please wake up,” Marya whispered again.

  But the girl did not. She froze, threads frazzling and sliding out of their pattern. She folded her hands in her lap but did not look up or speak, and the gold film did not thin.

  “Yelena? Can you hear me? Is anyone left inside you? I’m so afraid, Yelena. Did he love you? Did you leave him? Did he chain you against the silver tapestries? Did you like his kisses? Were you happy here? Did you know a boy named Ivan? Do you want to go home? How long was it, between the time when you were happy, and the time when you wanted to kill him?” Marya swallowed hard. “He told me to forget you, to be selfish, to be cruel, to be a demon. But I dream about you, and in my dreams you carry water for Baba Yaga, and have a firebird hanging in a golden cage, and Koschei loves you as much as he loves me.”

  The girl stared at her folded hands.

  “What if I said, Go, Yelena, I will not sound the alarm. Run, get out, fly!”

  The girl did not move.

  “Yelena, Yelena, you’re the only ones like me in all the world. What will happen to me? What has happened to you? To all of you? Yelena, every spring I march out with all these soldiers, and when I touch their shoulders, I think of you, all of you. I can’t help it. And it strikes such awful fear in me, because I seem to see terror and uncertainty in their woven eyes, and they are not meant to be alive. But they cry out when they are shot, as if they were alive, and I shiver. Speak to me, Yelena. Or Vasilisa—is it Vasilisa? I feel my heart draining from me, every day, in every cold tent, in every inch of half-dead earth where blood spills like thread. I am so afraid, Vasilisa. I fear the war is going badly.”

  But the weaver did not look up, and all around them the machines whirred on, without a care for either of them. Marya wiped her tears and stood up. Her knee popped and creaked, having been bashed in during the first battle of Skorohodnaya Road, one they had won, but barely, oh, just barely.

  The weaver, Yelena or Vasilisa, turned her head slowly, without moving the rest of her body. She stared blindly at Marya’s stomach, at the height where her face had been a moment before.

  “The war is always going badly,” the girl said, and picked up her shuttle once more.

&
nbsp; Marya Morevna pulled at the girl’s arm. She hauled as hard as she could, but it was like pulling stone. She went from girl to girl, pleading, crying, her face hot and shamed, forgetting, for once, all about herself, knowing only that one had spoken, and so they must all be alive. But no Yelena budged, and no Vasilisa spoke again, and none of them would go with her, even when she fell into a heap in the center of the whirring factory’s floor, hopeless and defeated.

  * * *

  “Is he a vampire?” asked Ivan Nikolayevich, sitting uncomfortably in the red sea of her bed, unconcernedly naked, ignoring the black nightshirt Koschei had provided.

  “What an odd thing to say,” said Marya, standing by her mirror. She watched herself as she brushed out her long, ruined hair with long strokes of a boar’s bristle brush—one which called no strange old woman, which brought no fate to bear. The boar’s hair passed through Marya Morevna’s hair, glistening. She liked her body, liked looking at it, even—especially—scored with the tiger stripes of welts across her naked heavy breasts, her belly. She did not have a girl’s body anymore; her hips were a lion’s hips, her chest strong and muscled, her legs trained to leap and run and kneel to fire. Scars marked her skin like constellations, leading all the way up to the first, Zmey Gorinich’s mark, which still stood on her cheek like a streak of black paint.

  “He licked the blood on your hand,” Ivan said. “And he is old, and pale, and his teeth are like tusks. I know he looks young, but he’s not, really. Sitting next to him is like sitting next to some impossibly ancient statue in a museum. So I think it’s a logical question, really.”

  “He is the Tsar of Life, and blood is life. So is soup and vodka and baths and fucking. But I don’t think he’s a vampire. At least, not the kind you bury upside down at crossroads.”