Deathless

by Catherynne Valente

  Ivan frowned and ran a broad brown hand through his hair. “You keep calling him that. The Tsar of Life.”

  “That’s what he is.” And am I the Tsaritsa of Life, then? half her heart asked. The other half answered, Not even for a moment were you ever queen.

  “But it’s a certain kind of life, isn’t it?” Ivan leaned forward, his sunburned head catching the candlelight. He looked like a wonderful dog, huge and hearty, who had found a bone. “It’s … mushroom-life. The pale, rooty kind that grows in blackness. I’ll bet in all your years here he has never given you a fresh apple to eat. Everything he loves is preserved, salted … pickled. I suppose it’s alive, but it’s kept alive, forever, in a glass bell. And he is, too. A pickled husband, that’s what you have.”

  Marya turned from the mirror, scowling. “And you are fresh, is that it? Right off the tree? But then you will brown, and turn mealy, and there will be worms in you, someday. Koschei will never wilt.”

  Ivan shrugged bashfully. “I would not presume.”

  “Of course you will. You presume already.”

  “You are a human woman,” he said quietly. “You do not belong here, with all this blood, all this pickling. And their brine is seeping into you, bit by bit. You can even disappear like they can. And who knows what else!”

  “Well.” Marya laughed gently. “I can’t really, not like they can. I’m not very good at it. I can only do it in certain places, where the boundaries are quite thin. We had to walk to the place where I spun around and carried you off, remember? I do not know so many of those places. Territory changes too fast to keep the maps up-to-date. But you could probably do it, too, in the thin places. If you practiced. It isn’t hard.”

  “I don’t want to do it.” Ivan Nikolayevich began to roll a cigarette. Without her asking, a bronze tray had quietly appeared, set neatly with papers and crisp, curling tobacco. Ivan thought the stuff hers, but Marya knew better—Koschei had inserted himself here, between them, even when he was gone.

  “Why not?” She shrugged. “It’s fun. It feels good.”

  “Not to me. You feel good, and sunlight on wheat, and fresh butter and eggs and cigarettes like these, which I roll myself, just as I like them. Magic feels like stripping off my skin and putting it on again, backwards.”

  Marya put down her brush and crawled onto the bed, reveling in the feeling of stalking him, catlike, hungry. Of knowing more than he did. It was how Koschei felt, she guessed. All the time.

  “Well,” she purred, “I like all of those things, too. I don’t want to choose between them. Koschei doesn’t make me choose.”

  “Yes,” Ivan said softly, stroking her face with his hand. “He does. It’s only that he makes stripping off your skin taste like fresh butter and feel like sunlight on wheat.”

  Marya frowned. If he would only ask her, if he would only behave like a bird, like a man in black, she would find all this so much easier. “Ivan, you do not understand us. A marriage is a private thing. It has its own wild laws, and secret histories, and savage acts, and what passes between married people is incomprehensible to outsiders. We look terrible to you, and severe, and you see our blood flying, but what we carry between us is hard-won, and we made it just as we wished it to be, just the color, just the shape.”

  Ivan kissed her, hesitantly, sweetly, as a boy kisses a girl on the schoolyard. Her mouth flowed with warmth.

  “Look how you kiss me, Marya Morevna,” he whispered, “while you tell me what marriage is!”

  “It is selfish to hoard resources, Ivan Nikolayevich, when we might share, each according to need. Why can I not have both? Both of you, Leningrad and Buyan, pickled and fresh, man and bird?”

  He kissed her again, deeper, and the taste of him in her mouth was bright, brighter than blood.

  “What do we carry between us, then, Masha?”

  “Nothing,” she breathed. What he dared, to call her Masha so soon! “Yet.”

  Marya Morevna gripped his shoulders in her hands and pushed him down beneath her. She clamped his narrow hips between her lion-thighs and kissed him with all the biting and possessing she had learned, with everything she had to give to a kiss. Her hair swept over his face, a black curtain, hiding all light, plunging him inescapably into her.

  Ivan clapped his hand to the back of her neck, moving under her, arching his back to press closer. He moaned under her, his coin-colored lashes so long, like a girl’s.

  “Come with me, back to Leningrad,” he whispered. “Come back.” There. There, he has asked. And I must choose. War before me, and behind, a woman I do not know, the woman I could have been, a human woman, whole and hot.

  And in the depths of herself, Marya felt her old house on Gorokhovaya Street, on Kommissarskaya Street, on Dzerzhinskaya Street, unfold and creak and beckon, and the sounds of the Neva gurgle greenly. Things she had not allowed herself to remember came pouring out of Ivan’s kisses, out of his skin, out of his seed. She smelled the sea. But 1942 is not so far off now, she thought desperately, his warmth suffusing her whipped belly. Not so far.

  And the heart of Ivan Nikolayevich broke inside the body of Marya Morevna, and the pieces of him lodged deep in her bones, and through the window, the stars watched.

  * * *

  Later, after they had shared water and a few slices of ruby meat, Marya saw the red scarf Ivan Nikolayevich had had knotted around his arm peeking out from beneath his jacket. She bent and touched its tip, which protruded like a tongue.

  Ivan smiled a little. “It’s my Young Pioneers scarf. I don’t know why I still carry it. I just like it. It made me feel safe when I was young. Made me feel good, as though I could not be harmed, because I was so good, because I belonged.”

  He looked at her for a long moment, his warm tea-colored eyes darkened by candlelight until they were almost black, like Koschei’s. But Ivan’s gaze held her in a circle of heat and quiet night truths. Marya said nothing; held her breath. And then he did it, and she thought her body would shake itself apart. Ivan Nikolayevich untied the scarf from his coat and hung it around Marya Morevna’s naked neck, lifting her long hair over its cloth, so that the tails hung down over her breasts, covering them in scarlet like bloody tears.

  * * *

  Marya woke in the bottomless well before dawn, her eyes snapping open in the dark. She sat up straight, Ivan a pleasant warm heap beside her, insensate. A silvery white woman sat at her vanity, her long, pale fingers touching the pots, one by one. Her white hair hung loose to her waist. She wore a cameo, a perfect carving of a woman with long pale hair and a silver star on her breast.

  “Mashenka, my darling,” Madame Lebedeva sighed. “How I miss you. How I wish you would talk to me.”

  The vila turned, and the silver star on her chest cast sinuous shadows on the ceiling. Her eyelids were painted a lighter color than Marya had ever seen.

  “I won’t hurt you,” the ghost said softly. “I won’t. All these years, and you still don’t know I would never drag you after me, not ever. It is the terrible hour when anything may be said. I have waited for this hour. Speak one word to me, Masha. Acknowledge me. I love you. Once you are dead, shame sloughs off like an old shirt. It costs nothing to be plain about such things. I love you. Do you not love me?”

  Marya’s eyelids slid heavily closed again—but she forced them open. And she did look, intently, at her old friend. She could hardly bear her face. She wanted to run to her and be held, but no, no, never again. Never. She would not mean to drag Marya off, but it would happen anyway, like gravity, like falling a long way. She did not want to speak. But the weight of those years spent not looking behind her, not noticing the silver footsteps at her back, oh, that weight sat heavy in her lap.

  “I love you, Lebed,” Marya Morevna said finally, and wept, slowly, without sound, without tears. She had dried up, utterly.

  “It’s not so bad, my darling. Being dead. It’s like being alive, only colder. Things taste less. They feel less. You forget, little by little, who
you were. There isn’t much love, but there is a lot of vodka, and reminiscing. It’s rather like a university reunion, but the cakes and tarts are made of dust. And there is always a war on. But there was always a war on before, too, wasn’t there? And the sight of warm things just makes you furious, angrier than I ever thought I could be. I have no warm things of my own, you see. I want them so. And I cannot remember things so well. As though I am getting old—but I cannot ever get any older. Still, I am glad you spoke to me before I forgot you.”

  “I thought if I didn’t look at you, any of you, you would go away, and I wouldn’t have to remember.”

  “Someday, we will go away. Or maybe we’ll forget who you are but still cling to you because of habit, and all we will know is that we have always clung to this girl with black hair, whoever she is.” Madame Lebedeva touched the mirror, looking at herself as though she were a very beautiful stranger. A wet, silver stain spread out from her fingertip over the glass like frost forming.

  “Did it hurt?” Marya whispered. “When you died?”

  “I don’t remember. I was bringing your veil—really, how could you get married without a veil, Masha? It’s shameful. I was bringing it and someone shot me. I thought I had tripped over something for a moment, and then the assassin took me in his arms—oh, how silver they gleamed!—and put his mouth to my wound. He suckled like a babe, and I thought, I will never suckle anyone, not ever—and then I died. It was like pulling on a rope as hard as you can and then suddenly it jerks free and you fall, because you were straining so hard that you couldn’t help going over the edge. I put flowers on my body. I was so fond of it. And, you know, during the struggle for the Chernosvyat, a phosphor-shell hit the old magicians’ cafe. Now it’s in our country, and I can eat there whenever I like. Dust soup, dust dumplings. Little tartlets of ash.” Lebedeva pointed at Marya suddenly; her voice sharpened. “You ought to go with Ivan, Masha. Listen to your friend. She is still a magician. She still knows things.”

  “It will break Koschei’s heart.” She had decided to stay. She had decided to go. In her sleep she had decided a thousand times. Her dreams were split in half.

  “Eh. It’s been broken before. And it isn’t a heart. You have to look out for yourself. Soon enough my lord will decide he has had enough of your rifle and come to feast on you, treaty or no treaty. Why should you not have some peace before then? Leningrad in 1940—such a quiet place. You could be happy.”

  “I hardly know this boy.” Marya drank in the sight of her friend, and a dull ache began between her breasts. She must stop speaking to Lebedeva; she must stop—but she could not.

  “You hardly knew Koschei. Abduction is a marvelous icebreaker.”

  Marya Morevna passed her hand over her eyes. “Lebed, why? Why would I ever leave Buyan? This is my home.”

  “Because this is how it happens. How he dies. How he always dies. The only way he can die. Dying is a part of his marriages, no less than lovemaking. He wouldn’t know what to do if you didn’t kill him at some point.”

  “I will never kill him! Even if I go, even if I leave, I wouldn’t kill him!”

  “We shall see. But you will go. Because you are still somewhat young and you need the sun on your face, the high Leningrad sun, to redden your cheeks. Go, and sleep easy, and do not think about how many men will die today.”

  “Koschei would stop me.” But would he? Perhaps he would simply find another girl. Perhaps it would start all over again, only without Marya Morevna, and she could steal some measure of respite.

  “He’s too proud for that. Think he ever stopped the others?”

  “I am not like the others.”

  “Oh, but Masha, can’t you see? You are. An Ivan has come. That is like saying, Midnight has struck. It is time for bed, little one. You cannot have both. In war you must always choose sides. One or the other. Silver or black. Human or demon. If you try to be a bridge laid down between them, they will tear you in half.”

  Marya spread her hands; only Lebedeva could hear her fear, the wounds she had hidden in her jaw, in the space Koschei had made when he took her will. “Lebed, how can I live in that world? I am hardly human. I was only a child—how can I find the girl I was before I knew what magic was? That world will not love me. It will kick me and slap me in the snow, and take my scarf, and leave me ashamed and bleeding.”

  “You will live as you live in any world,” Madame Lebedeva said. She reached out her hand as if to grasp Marya’s, as if to press it to her cheek, then closed her fingers, as if Marya’s hand were in hers. “With difficulty, and grief.”

  And slowly, with the infinite care of a woman dressing for the theatre, Madame Lebedeva stretched her long, elegant neck—so far, so far!—her breasts fluffing into feathers, her slender legs tucking up beneath her, until she was a swan, a black band across her eyes. She hopped onto the windowsill and flew away into the aching, raw night.

  19

  Three Sisters

  And so Marya Morevna stole the human boy with gold hair, pulling him down the icy, dawn-darkened streets lined with yawning silver echoes. They kept to the left side; they did not look back. Ivan Nikolayevich rode behind her on a horse with red ears and small hooves, who was not of Volchya-Yagoda’s get, but rather his sinister-slantwise nephew, as horses count such things. The horse was possessed of no mechanical leanings whatsoever, only a horse who loved his mistress and thrilled, deep in the memories of his slantwise cells, to be used as an instrument of abduction. Marya, for her part, wondered, as her teeth took cold from the wind, if there could ever be love without this running in the night, this fleeing, this hurtling into dark lands; without the fear that someone, mother or father or husband, might reach out a sorrowful hand to pull her back. Ivan held her around the waist as their horse careened into the forest, heedless of bough or stone. He said nothing. She could think of nothing to say. She had taken him, and what can you say to a taken thing? Her bones jangled in the saddle. Her knee creaked. The old blister below her eye throbbed.

  But no hand unhorsed them. No black guard flew through the yellow larches to yank her backwards by the hair. The morning sun pointed redly at them, accusing, righteous. Under its disapproving stare they rode, through the day, into the afternoon. Through the afternoon, and into the night. The stars drew a map of heaven onto the black above.

  Finally, the horse with red ears wheezed, spat, and fell to his knees in the snowy shadows of a forest clearing. They had stopped at a great estate, firelight glowing and glimmering in every crystalline window with the cozy wintertime carelessness of the very rich. Stables it surely had, and hay. The horse had led them well. A great glass door stood ever so invitingly ajar. Marya’s eyes swam with the whipping of wind and snow. She peered in, afraid to enter, certain Koschei had set this up for her, to rack her with guilt, to make her remember all those soft, quiet little houses on the road to Buyan. To place himself in their bed, like tobacco appearing noiselessly on a table.

  But they were alone. The horse nosed peaceably in the snow. No sound, not even owls, broke the blackness. And so Marya helped Ivan—saddle-sore and shivering in the bitter, rigid cold—across the threshold.

  The foyer of the dacha flowed around them, its deep malachite floor speckled with brown jasper, its candelabras all ruby and amethyst. And in the center of the shining floor sat a great egg of blue enamel, crisscrossed with gold leafing and studded with diamonds like nail-heads. Atop the egg perched a middle-aged woman, her fair hair clapped back like a hay-roll in autumn. She peered at two silver knitting needles over her glasses, where half a child’s crimson stocking hung, growing slowly, inch by inch.

  Marya’s heart spun in surprise.

  “Olga!” she cried out. “How is this possible? How can you have come to be here, so deep in the forest? How can I have found you in all the expanse of the world? It is your sister, Masha!” Marya might have wept, but her tears froze within her, so tired and afraid and stiff was she, so afraid that she was being tricked, that the woman w
ould slide off the egg and bounce up something else, something awful, something accusing.

  The woman looked up, and her face shone, all porcelain and pink. She filled like a wineskin with the sight of her sister, and, tucking her knitting under one thick arm, leapt down from her egg and kissed Marya all over her face before turning to Ivan and kissing him very chastely on the cheeks. “Marya! Oh, my darling sister!” she exclaimed, and she smelled so like Olga that it could not have been a trick. “So much time has passed! Look at you, grown as a bear! Ah! When did we stop being children?”

  Marya longed to raise up her arms and have Olga lift her and twirl her as she used to, when they were young together in the house on Gorokhovaya Street.

  “Olya, are you happy? Are you well?”

  “Oh, very well! And with my sixth daughter on the way!” She patted the jeweled egg fondly. “This sort of thing is what comes of marrying a bird.” She winked. “But then, you always knew he was a bird, didn’t you? And you didn’t tell me. Wicked girl. But what about you? Are you happy? Are you well?”

  “I am tired,” said Marya Morevna. “Olya, this is Ivan Nikolayevich. He is not a bird.”

  Ivan bowed to Marya’s oldest sister.

  Olga daintily pushed her glasses up onto her nose. “Oh, I know who he is. Think lieutenants don’t talk, do you? Gossip is like gold in these parts. Just look at my sister, run off, a scandal, and at her age! I’ll have you know I’ve been faithful to Gratch since he first took my arm, and I’ve fourteen precious little chicks to show for it!”

  “So many!” Ivan whistled.

  Olga narrowed her lovely eyes at him. “Haven’t you heard there’s a war on?” She scowled. “We must all do our part.”

  “I’ve told Marya. We’ve a pact with Germany. War does not even dream of Russia. Your sister will be safe in Leningrad.”