Deathless

by Catherynne M. Valente

  “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!”

  “Gah-voo,” huffed the racing hound, his ribs showing like the strings of a balalaika. “Your scent is so delicious, Grandmother! Last time you visited, you smelled like death and tooth rot!” The hound inhaled deeply. “Now I smell orange blossoms and fresh blood under a bouquet of old duck bones and myrrh. How did you get yourself so clean?”

  Marya squeezed her fists hard in her pockets. She spun out her lie like thread. “I found an old perfume peddler traveling to Odessa with his wagon. After I rode him through the forest, I snatched up all his little bottles and smashed them against my forehead, one for every gulp of vodka in his stash!” After a moment, she added, “He died! I killed him!”

  The dogs looked dubious. The pillars of saliva jiggled as water dripped on them from the stone ceiling. Finally, the wolf shrugged her furry shoulders.

  “Haroo, Grandmother. What brings you to our house tonight? If you are hungry, we have a nice blood soup boiling, if Bitter here hasn’t lapped it all up.”

  The racing hound reached up and bit the wolf’s ear. “What have I said about using my name? No one is supposed to know!”

  The wolf rolled her yellow eyes, turned bone-bright by the phosphorescent light. “It’s our grandmother, Bitter. She knows our names. Besides, she would never harm our Papa! Unless he really deserved to be hurt; then she would.”

  “Well, Bile,” groused the hound, “don’t tell means don’t tell. Even a last-born pup knows that.”

  “Rup, rup! I shan’t ever tell my name,” yapped the lapdog, licking his paws. “That way, when Papa comes to praise us, he will know I was good and the rest of you were naughty, wicked curs, and pat me on the head and give me biscuits.”

  The sheepdog laughed, the rumbling of her swollen chest shaking the pillars of spit. Her jowls sloughed over their edges. “She’s our babushka, Blood, you ungrateful, toadying poodle! See if she brings you New Year’s presents!” The lapdog squeaked in indignation at the sound of his name. The sheepdog looked up at Marya in frank, canine adoration. “Will you let me ride with you again this year? How I remember the wind in my cheeks!”

  “Haroo, Brumal, you kiss-up! She called you a drunken hag, Grandmother. I heard her, not a week ago,” crooned the wolf confidentially.

  “And I said she wouldn’t be angry! Would you, Grandmother? I was singing a dinner song in your honor! Drunken hag rhymes with hearts in a bag!”

  “You and your songs!” giggled the lapdog, Blood. “Star of the Moscow stage, you are!”

  Brumal leapt off her saliva-pillars and tackled Blood with a snarl.

  Marya watched them fight. She could not believe her luck—all their names, cast into her lap like dolls. But if these were Koschei’s dogs, then Koschei’s death rested in that shining glass chest. Chairman Yaga clearly meant for her to steal it and return to the Chernosvyat triumphant, only to be shown up as a faithless Yelena who meant only to destroy him. And yet, if she did not return with it, Yaga would devour her, and none of her innocence would matter. Her belly churned. The dogs wrestled at her feet, blood dripping from both of their throats.

  “Blood,” she whispered, holding out her hands. “Brumal, peace.”

  The two dogs froze, the whites of their eyes showing. They turned to look at her, betrayal sparkling in their gaze, and fell down dead, Blood curled into rigor on Brumal’s enormous, spotted chest.

  The regal wolf leapt at her, slavering.

  “You are no Grandmother!” she spat.

  “Bile, Bitter!” Marya shouted fearfully—and the wolf fell dead out of the air, thumping onto the cave floor with a crackle of bones. The racing hound died quietly, lying in a tight ball, minding his own business, as though he had always expected to die this way.

  The chest gleamed softly, ringed in dead dogs. Marya knelt and worked its slippery clasp. The lid sprang open with a jingle of broken ice.

  Inside lay an egg, wrapped up in black silk. A simple hen’s egg, brown and round, its crown spattered with freckles.

  13

  The Tsar of Life and the Tsar of Death

  Marya Morevna wanted to run across the throne room to Koschei, to lay her head in his lap, to tell him everything that she had suffered, to hear him reassure her with some obvious explanation of the girls in the factory which did not include the word Yelena. But he sat heavily on his throne of onyx and bone, his chin thrust into his hands. He did not look at her. The same maps and papers cluttered his great table, and Koschei scowled so deeply the walls curved away from him, desperate to escape his displeasure. He did not even flinch when the tall black door banged open and Baba Yaga stomped in, her cigarillo leaving blue trails like battle flags behind her. She strode up to Koschei’s chair, her coat flaring, and kissed him wetly on the lips, her wide mouth hungrily devouring him. Koschei turned up his face and returned her kiss. Marya was too racked to gasp or cry out. Her eyes simply filled with tears, and she wanted to disappear.

  “Don’t look so shocked, soup!” laughed Chairman Yaga, smacking her lips. “This one was my husband, oh, centuries back! My ninth, I think. Only fair that I rumple your mount a bit: My mortar is half in a swoon with your riding it so hard, rubbing another mistress’ musk on its pestle so that the poor beast gets all confused!”

  “You said he was your brother,” Marya said numbly, her face burning. Her chest sank, kicked in by the sight of them.

  “Chyerti, kid. Demons. What should we care? When you live forever, sooner or later you try everything, just to see. Didn’t work out, though, all the same.” Yaga caressed Koschei’s cheek tenderly with the back of her hand. “The only one I couldn’t eat.” Koschei smiled wanly. The crone jumped off the black dais and marched up to Marya, her breath dank and old in her face. She looked over Marya’s coat, her leather apron, her makeup. “I get to give the tests because I know what it takes to be married to a snake. I do know what I’m talking about.” She pursed her cracked lips. “I just love your coat, Marya.”

  “I passed your tests, Chairman Yaga.”

  “Oh? Well, then, let’s see it!”

  Marya pulled the egg from where she had kept it, close to her breast, warm and safe. Koschei hissed, sucking his breath through his teeth.

  “I told you, Brother. Just like the others. She’ll be the death of you.”

  Chairman Yaga turned the egg over in her calloused hand, cracked it open, and slurped up the insides, her teeth shining with yellow yolk.

  Marya cried out, agonized. Was that his death? It looked like an egg. “No! You can’t! I did everything you asked me!”

  Baba Yaga sucked her tongue. “She’s right! Have her if you still want her, Kostya. I give my blessing with both hands. She’s a sneaking, lying, dog-murdering thief, and she looks just like me! I’ll even dower the bitch.” The old woman sat with a satisfied plop at the map-strewn desk, putting out her cigarillo on a sketch of the countryside.

  Hot tears fell down Marya’s face. “I didn’t know where she’d send me. I didn’t know the dogs would be there—”

  “But once you got there you killed them all and took the egg,” pointed out Baba Yaga. “Knowing exactly what you did. My poor, bereaved brother raised those dogs from pups.”

  “Koschei, say something!” Marya pleaded. “Why don’t you speak to me?”

  “What should I say?” Koschei said softly, his voice dark and grinding. “It should be clear that the egg was not my death, since my sister has made lunch of it. Why would I ever have told you where I hid it? Of course you would go after it. You can’t help it. Tell a girl something is a secret and nothing will stop her from ferreting it out.”

  “You lied to me
.” And she meant it all. The egg, the Yelenas. The insult to her girlhood. Everything.

  Koschei’s face betrayed no expression at all. “With good reason, as you can see.”

  “You cannot condemn me for betrayal—a betrayal connived by her, contrived by her!—if you lied to me yourself, and about more than the egg.”

  Koschei cocked his head to one side curiously, like a black bird. He rose and crossed the room to her, taking her face in his long fingers. He gripped her jaw tightly. “Have I condemned you, Marya Morevna? Have I called you faithless?”

  Marya wept bitterly, an unlovely, shattered kind of crying that strained at the bones of her face. When tears slipped over her scar, they sizzled and burned. “You left me alone to do all those awful things myself without seeing you, without talking to you. I saw the factory, but I couldn’t see you to ask how you could keep those girls, what you would do with me if I disobeyed.”

  Koschei studied her, his black eyes roving. “Of course I left you alone. Wedding preparations are the province of the bride. Should I have shepherded you like a father, so that anything you did would not be your own deed, but mine? I have no need to prove myself worthy of myself.”

  Marya jerked her chin free. “But what have I to prove? It should be you wrapped up in Zmey Gorinich’s coils, proving that you are not a monster, that you are worthy of me!”

  “Have I not proven it? Have I not taken you out of your starving city and fed you, clothed you in fine things, taught you how to listen and how to speak, brought you to a place where you are a mistress, a tsarevna adored and worshipped, made love to, your skin dusted with jewels? Did I not dower myself? Did I not come to you on my knees with a kingdom in my hand? And as for those girls, they belong to me, and that should terrify you. It should cow you and keep you gibbering and silent at my feet, like a beaten dog who knows what’s coming to her. Yet you still shout at me and rip your face from my hands and call me unworthy. You come to me dressed like my sister, with my death in your coat. No matter that it is not my death. You thought it was. Why do you do these things, even knowing that those girls sew away at my armies through this very hour?” Koschei wrapped his arms around her and drew her close. Marya shut her eyes against him, her lover, her death, her life. But she was afraid, too, of all of the things he could be. “I will tell you why. Because you are a demon, like me. And you do not care very much if other girls have suffered, because you want only what you want. You will kill dogs, and hound old women in the forest, and betray any soul if it means having what you desire, and that makes you wicked, and that makes you a sinner, and that makes you my wife.”

  No. I do care. I will get what I desire by all the tricks I know, and what those girls in the factory desire, too. You are mostly right, my love. But still wrong. She could say none of it, but she saved it in her chest, where it did not need to be spoken.

  Baba Yaga chewed off the tip of her thumbnail and spat it at them. “She kissed the leshy, you know. And not a nice kiss, either. She used her tongue and tasted his mud.”

  Koschei pushed Marya away to stare at her coldly. “Is this true?”

  “Yes.” She felt no shame on this score.

  Koschei smiled. His pale lips sought hers, crushing her into a kiss like dying. She tasted sweetness there, as though he still kissed her with honey and sugar on his tongue. When he pulled away, his eyes shone.

  “I don’t care, Marya Morevna. Kiss him. Take him to your bed, and the vila, too, for all it matters to me. Do you understand me, wife? There need never be any rules between us. Let us be greedy together; let us hoard. Let us hit each other with birch branches and lock each other in dungeons; let us drink each other’s blood in the night and betray each other in the sun. Let us lie and lust and take hundreds of lovers; let us dance until snow melts beneath us. Let us steal and eat until we grow fat and roll in the pleasures of life, clutching each other for purchase. Only leave me my death—let me hold this one thing sacred and unmolested and secret—and I will serve you a meal of myself, served on a platter of all the world’s bounty. Only do not leave me, swear that you will never leave me, and no empress will stand higher. Forget the girls in the factory. Be selfish and cruel and think nothing of them. I am selfish. I am cruel. My mate cannot be less than I. I will have you in my hoard, Marya Morevna, my black mirror.”

  Marya trembled. She felt something shake free inside her and drift away like ash. She reached up to him and gripped his jaw in her hand, digging her nails into his cold flesh. She would make her gambit; it was all she could do. “If you want me, Koschei Bessmertny, tell me where your death is. Between us there must be no lies. To the world we may lie and go stalking with claws out, but not to each other. It is only fair: You know where my death is, at the point of your knife or between strangling fingers or in a glass of poison. Show me that you can rest in my hand like a chick, small and weak and knowing that I could crush you if I wished it, but that I will not, will never. You owe me this, on the bodies of all those Yelenas, all those Vasilisas—and you owe me their bodies, too.”

  Koschei said nothing for a long while. His face floated above her, impassive, unmovable.

  “Don’t do it, Brother,” sighed Baba Yaga.

  “A butcher in Tashkent guards my death,” he said finally. “I left it in his care when I came for you. It sits in the eye of a needle, which sits inside an egg, which sits inside a hen, which sits inside a cat, which sits inside a goose, which sits inside a dog, which sits inside a doe, which sits inside a cow, and the cow lives with the butcher, very beloved of him and his children. His sons ride upon the cow who contains my death and slap its rump.”

  Marya kissed him hard, as if to drag out the truth, and the fringe of her black coat brushed against his chin.

  Chairman Yaga sat back in her chair. She lit a new cigar, and spat.

  “I guess some people would call those vows,” she grumbled, but the crone smiled, showing her brown teeth, still stained with golden yolk. “Weddings give me gas.”

  A cold wind began to seethe through the windowless room. It picked up speed, circling like a racing horse, whirling around and around, riffling through maps and papers, prickling skin, blowing hard and fast until it screamed by Marya Morevna and Koschei and Baba Yaga alike, snatching at their clothes, their hair, stealing their breath. Koschei raised his arms to shield his new wife. Baba Yaga rolled her eyes.

  “Shit,” she said succinctly, and the wind stopped short, leaving a white silence in its place.

  And someone stood in the room who had not stood there before. The man’s black hair fell all the way to the floor. He wore a grey priest’s cassock, and his chest glowed with a splatter of silver light, like a star. His eyelids were so long that they covered his body like a priest’s stole, their lashes brushing the floor. He held out his hands, stretching his long, colorless fingers toward them.

  “My congratulations on your nuptials, Brother,” the man rasped. His voice sounded far away, heard through three sheets of glass. “I would have brought gifts, if I had been invited. Cattle. And cease-fires.” He smoothed his eyelids like lapels.

  “But you weren’t invited, Viy,” snapped Baba Yaga. “Because you make a terrible guest. Putting out all the fires and wasting the dancing girls to skeletons when everyone else is trying to have a good ogle. Why would anyone invite you?”

  “Because I attend all weddings, Night,” purred Viy. “Death stands behind every bride, every groom. Even as they say their vows, the flowers are rotting in her crown, his teeth are rotting in his head. Cancers they will not notice for thirty years grow slowly, already, in their stomachs. Her beauty browns at the edges as the ring slides up her finger. His strength saps, infinitesimally, as he kisses her. If you listen in the church, you can hear my clock tick softly, as they tock together toward the grave. I hold their hands as they stride proudly down the very short road to dotage and death. It’s all so sweet, it makes me cry. Let me kiss your bride on both cheeks, Life. Let me feel her hot blood slowly cool aga
inst my eyelids.”

  “She is not for you, my brother,” said Koschei.

  “Oh? Have you removed her death, too, then? I remember when you did yours—feh, what a mess!” Beneath his eyelids Marya could see the orbs of Viy’s eyes turn to her. “Of course he hasn’t. Has he, child? I can see your death blossoming like a mushroom on your chest.” Marya’s hand rose to her chest, groping for the invisible death’s-head there. Viy extended his fingers toward her, slowly, as if moving through water. A pinprick stung between her breasts—it did not hurt, exactly, but it anchored her, wholly, so that she knew Viy could move her wherever he liked. He had caught her by her heart, or her death, or both, and she wavered as he wove his ghastly fingers through the dark air. Marya had never even thought to ask for her own death to be gouged out. Not so clever, after all. She fought to hold still, to resist, but her torso writhed and shuddered. Viy dropped his hand and shook his ponderous head. The sting faded. “Don’t take it personally. Never for anyone else does our brother take out his scalpel. Only he lives forever. Everyone else, one way or another, is for me. Can only be for me. And Life, that old tyrant, he knows my land is fertile now. So many white flowers. So many dead since ’17. So many more of us than of you. Soon there will be nowhere you can walk where my folk do not flow over and around you, do not drink of your sweat, do not swallow your heat. So maybe I will still attend your wedding, eh, girl? Maybe it will be me standing by your wraith at a silver altar, putting a stone ring on the shade of your finger, suckling at the ghost of your virginity. I could fight on the field of your belly. We could split you like a province, between him and me.”

  Baba Yaga scratched her braided eyebrow. “So, how did you manage to break the treaty, Viy? You aren’t allowed in Buyan and you know it. There’s doors and dogs between you and us. These little family gatherings are so awkward! Three of us in a room! That hasn’t happened since … hm, I make it since the fall of Constantinople. We went to so much trouble to keep your carcass out. It hurts our feelings when you ignore our wishes like this. Of course, oldest children are always stuffed full of their own snot.”