Deathless Read online

  Of course, it is just as easy, in this manner, to reach the country of the Tsar of Death. Travel is never without risk.

  Zemlehyed the leshy squinted at the great black book. With one gnarled, mossy hand, he shook it by its corner. A few leaves fell on it from the canopy of birches. Sunlight spilled down through the white branches, cool and golden and crisp. The coal-colored spine of the heavy volume glittered where the waxy autumnal light struck it. Dubiously, the leshy gave the cover a good gnaw. He wrinkled his burl-nose. Zemlehyed looked more or less like what you would get if a particularly stunted and ugly oak tree had fallen passionately in love with a boulder and produced, at great cost to both, a single child. His mistletoe eyebrows waggled.

  “Why she read this none-sense? It’s got no pictures. Also, boring.”

  Naganya the vintovnik rolled her eye. She had only one to roll, since her left eye was less an eye than a rifle scope, jutting out from her skull, made of bone and glassy thumbnail. Nevertheless, she wore half a pair of spectacles over the other eye, for she felt naked and embarrassed without some sort of lens to look through. The imp’s walnut skin gleamed from attentive polishing, though her blackened, ironwork sinews showed through in places: her elbows, her cheek, the backs of her knees.

  “Don’t you pay attention? Likho gave it to her.” Naganya sniffed ostentatiously. She produced a grey handkerchief and wiped a trickle of black oil from her nose. “Still, I don’t approve. Histories are instruments of oppression. Writers of histories ought to be shot on sight.”

  Zemlehyed snorted. “Who’s this Tsar of Life? Never met the man.”

  “Who do you think, rock-brain? He’s not called Deathless for nothing.” Naganya peered at the book for a moment, clicking her tongue against her teeth. It made a horrid mechanical noise, like a gun cocking and uncocking. “You’re right, though. It is boring. Overwritten. I’m surprised you can read it at all.”

  “Nor good to eat! Shit! Why not tear it up and bury it? Some nice tree have a good munch, eh?” Zemlehyed spat a glob of golden sap on their picnic blanket. Naganya grimaced.

  “Why the tsarevna lets you blunder after her is a mystery to me. You’re disgusting. But if you want to wreck her things, be my guest. At least the evisceration will be amusing. What do leshiyi look like on the inside? All mud and sticks?”

  “Paws off, gun-goblin! My insides; my property!”

  “Property is theft!” snapped Naganya, her cheek-pistons clicking. “Therefore, just by sitting there you’re stealing from the People, Zemya! Bandit! Ring the alarms!”

  Zemlehyed spat again.

  “But Zemya,” she whined, “I’m bored! Why don’t I interrogate you again? It’ll be fun! I’ll leave my safety on this time, I promise.”

  The leshy gnashed his stone teeth with their rime of muck. “Nasha, why you only bored when I’m around? Get bored with someone else!”

  Through the bramble-thicket two horses exploded, their riders flattened against their backs. The black one raced ahead, a young woman shrieking laughter in her green enamel saddle, her dark hair streaming, braided wildly with garnets and rough sea amber, her hunting cloak a red sail. She darted expertly between the pale, bony birches, ducking boughs heavy with yellow leaves and thin, brown vines sagging with ruby-colored berries. Behind her leapt a white mare and a pale lady riding sidesaddle, every bit as keen and fierce as the black rider, the swan feathers in her snowy hair flying off in pale clouds. Their stamping hooves set up whirlwinds of old orange leaves as they galloped past.

  “Did it come this way?” cried Marya Morevna, her eyes blazing, reining her dark horse in and circling impatiently.

  “Who?” barked the leshy.

  “My firebird! Got moss in your ears again, Zemya?”

  “You’re too slow,” sighed Naganya. “It blew through here over an hour ago. Singed my hair, which naturally incinerated most of our lunch.” Naganya’s hair glistened, wet and dark with gun-oil, reeking of gasoline.

  “Well, then,” said Madame Lebedeva, leaping lightly from her horse and adjusting her elegant white hat, which still had several of its swan plumes attached. At her throat, a pearly cameo gleamed, showing a perfect profile of herself. “I, for one, shall have a cup of tea and a rest. Firebirds are such frustrating quarry. One minute it’s all fiery tail feathers and red talons and the next, nothing but ash and a sore seat.” She knotted her mare to a larch tree and settled down on the slightly sappy picnic blanket, brushing invisible dust from her white jodhpurs and blazer.

  Marya leaned her hunting rifle up against a fire-colored maple and fell in a heap onto the blanket. She hugged Zemya vigorously—which is the only way to do anything involving a leshy—and planted a kiss on his oak-bark cheek. The hunt had gotten her blood and her hungers up—she vibrated with excitement.

  “What have we to eat?” Marya asked cheerfully, her jewel-strewn hair falling over one shoulder. She wore a smart black suit, half uniform, half hunting dress.

  “Burnt toast, burnt pirozhki, onions both pickled and burnt. I believe even the tea has a distinct smoky flavor,” sighed the vintovnik.

  “We can’t leave you alone for a second.” Madame Lebedeva scowled.

  “Three hours, vila!” groused Zemlehyed, scratching his knees. “And she were interrogating me again. Look!” He displayed his hands, each of which had a neat bullet hole through the leafy palm. “The price of cronyism, she says!”

  “Well, now, you have to admit, you do hew fairly close to the heels of the Tsar’s favorite.” Madame Lebedeva smiled.

  “And you don’t? Where’s your price, eh?”

  “I am very careful not to be alone with the zealous Nasha.” The vila sniffed. “This is the best way to avoid interrogations, I find.”

  “Peace!” Marya Morevna laughed, holding up her hands. On each finger gleamed silver rings studded with rough, uncut malachites and rubies. “If you don’t behave, all of you, I shall not tell you any more stories about Petrograd!”

  Naganya’s limpid eye filled with greasy black tears. “Oh, Masha, that’s not fair! How shall I further the Party’s interests in the hinterlands if you will not teach me about Marx and Papa Lenin?”

  Zemya scowled, his mouth little more than a gap in the rock of his chin. “Who is Papa Lenin? Tfu! Zemlehyed has one Papa: Papa Koschei. He needs no nasty bald Papa Lenin!”

  Marya Morevna’s face brightened and darkened all at once. She twisted the rings on her fingers. When she thought of Koschei, her blood boiled and froze all together. “Well, I’m sure that puts an end to the debate, Zem. Nasha?”

  Naganya sighed dramatically. “I ought to go to Petrograd myself!” she wailed. “What use has a rifle imp out here where the best diversion for my sort is common hunting? How I long for real utility, to hunt out enemies of the People and put holes in them!”

  Madame Lebedeva yawned and stretched her long arms. Her beauty was impossibly delicate and pointed, birdlike and nearly colorless, save for her dark, depthless eyes. “When is he going to marry you, Mashenka? How tiresome for you, to wait like this!”

  “I don’t know, Lebed, my love. He is so occupied with the war, you know. All day and night in the Chernosvyat, poring over papers and troop allotments. Hardly a good time for a wedding.” In truth, Marya was tired of waiting. She squinted in the frosty sunlight, wishing to be Tsaritsa, to be safe here, to know she would not have to go home, back where she did not have a horse or firebirds to hunt, where she did not have such friends.

  “Maybe he doesn’t love you anymore.” Naganya shrugged, her mouth half-full of pirozhki.

  “Squirrel crap! Smashed snail’s got more sense than you,” growled Zemlehyed. “Papa can’t marry nobody. Not ’til she approves. Not ’til Babushka comes.”

  “I wish she’d get a move on!” sighed Madame Lebedeva. She nibbled a bit of blackened onion. “I want to apply for the magicians’ dacha this summer. It’s quite competitive, and I can’t concentrate on my application while I’m worried half to death over Masha�
�s trousseau. The entrance essays are brutal, darlings.”

  Naganya sniggered. “What’s a Petrograd girl’s trousseau? Horse shit and half a pint of Neva washing water?”

  “I’m sure it’s no business of an imp,” Lebedeva snarled. “Leave it to those of us with a teaspoon of refinement to spare.”

  “As if a vila witch knows anything but hair curlers and squinting for fortunes in a cup of piss!”

  Naganya narrowed her monocled eye and spat. A neat little bullet erupted out of her mouth and punched through Madame Lebedeva’s swan feathers, blowing her hat quite off her head. She shrieked in indignation, her ice-white hair singed black at the tips. Madame scrambled after her hat.

  “You beast! Marya! You must punish her! You made her swear not to shoot anyone this morning, and just look at her thwarting you!”

  Marya Morevna pulled on a very solemn expression. She beckoned the vintovnik to her side with a crooked, jeweled finger.

  “Nasha, you know you ought not to disobey me.”

  Naganya fell silent. Her hands trembled; her ironworks clicked nervously in her cheek.

  Suddenly, Marya’s hand flashed out and caught Naganya’s mouth and nose. With the other hand she grabbed the back of the vintovnik’s head. Naganya’s chest heaved, searching for breath, but Marya did not let go. She forced the imp to the ground, clamping her face in her fierce hand, leaping astride her, the better to pin her to the forest floor. Marya’s heart leapt and exulted in her. All unbidden she thought of a book of poems tossed into the snow, and a red scarf torn in half. She bore down harder. Slowly, black, oily tears pooled in Nasha’s eyes and trickled down over Marya Morevna’s knuckles as Nasha struggled, squirmed, and finally went still beneath her. Marya grinned, her braids brushing her friend’s walnut arms. Finally, she let Naganya up. The imp gasped and spluttered, chagrined and hoarse, wiping at her tears.

  “Let that be a lesson,” Marya Morevna said cheerfully. “Mind your trigger in mixed company! When I tell you to do something you must do it.” Perhaps all a Tsaritsa is is a beautiful cold girl in the snow, looking down at someone wretched, and not yielding. Marya thought these thoughts, her breath and pulse calming. Of late, she had felt that coldness in herself, and though she feared it, she loved it too, for it made her strong.

  Naganya sat shaking. Her breath came in gulps. She sniffed pitifully and pawed at her nose.

  “Oh, Nasha!” Marya cried, feeling suddenly not cold at all and a little embarrassed. Perhaps she had gotten carried away—but imps listened to no one who could not thrash them soundly. A good Tsaritsa speaks her subjects’ language, after all. “Don’t be sad! I’ll find you a nice rusalka to snatch out of her lake in the middle of the night and throttle for information! Won’t that be lovely?”

  Naganya smiled a little, mollified. A high walnut-colored blush rose in her cheeks, and Marya knew that she had enjoyed being punished, if only a little. She turned to the leshy.

  “Now, Zemya—oh, give me back that book! You’ve bitten it half to pieces! Zemya, who is this Babushka you mean? I thought I had met everyone here!”

  At that moment, a high, gorgeous cry echoed through the forest. An orange flame circled the clouds, so far up in the air that it seemed little more than a speck of fiery dust. Before Naganya could shout, Marya had snatched up her rifle, knelt, and fired.

  With a searing, crackling crash, a firebird fell from the sky.

  * * *

  “Why do they call this place the Isle of Buyan?” Marya mused as the four of them strode back down Skorohodnaya Road. The sun set over the city ahead, spilling light over warm white cupolas carved from smooth, gleaming bone. The first dusting of snow glinted on the road, promising the sweetness of winter to come. “It’s not an island at all, as far as I can tell.”

  “Used to be one,” said Zemlehyed, who was by far the oldest of them. “The unstopping salt sea. Your Lake Baikal? Tscha! Puddle! Our sea had fists, back in the yore.”

  “It continues to be a marvel to me,” said Madame Lebedeva, her musical voice causing even her white horse to step lighter, “that leshiyi ever learned to speak. What sort of process was it, I wonder? Did a lonely hedgehog bash on a rock until it made noises?”

  “Leshiyi learned from trees singing songs what birds taught, what birds learned from worms, what worms learned from dirt, what dirt learned from diamonds. Pedigreed, that’s us.”

  “Well, I’m sure you were a very poor student, Zemya. You haven’t got the vocabulary of a salamander. In any event, Masha, darling, the Isle of Buyan was once, indeed, an island, in a great sea where fish the size of galleons swam in golden waves. They sang, those fish, such songs at sunrise. If you had a hundred balalaikas and a thousand gusli, you could not play a song equal to the least of theirs.”

  “What happened?” Marya Morevna coaxed her black horse on ahead. He pulled a silver net behind him. Flaming feathers tufted out of it at every angle, scorching the earth beneath it as it dragged along.

  Madame Lebedeva sighed. “What happens to anything beautiful? Viy ate it up. First the great fish went belly up, one by one, their stomachs practically islands themselves. Then the water turned black and green, with mud currents all through it. Then the waves caught fire, and burned down to the seabed. The flames seared the stars—and then it was gone. Vapor and steam. All the whole of it, gone down into the coffers of the Tsar of Death. You can bet that in his country, there’s a ghost-sea full of ghost-fish still singing their songs, in a different key, with different words. And in our country, if you walk far enough out onto the plain, you’ll see great bones sticking out of the earth where the seabed used to be. Mountains lined with rib bones, valleys full of jaws.”

  Marya rode in silence. Each time she learned something of the long history of Koschei’s country and the war with the Tsar of Death, she loved Buyan a little more fiercely, and feared the war a little more sharply.

  “Shall we go mushroom picking tonight?” said Naganya softly, still abashed and thrilled by her punishment. “There’ll be a moon out, big as a bull’s-eye. And I’ve a belly for chanterelles.”

  The motley party passed through the city gate, a palisade of tangled, towering antlers, each prong crowned with a grinning skull. Marya no longer thought it grisly or shuddered as she passed beneath the empty eye sockets. Now, the skulls seemed to smile at her, to say, We who were once living can guard you still, and love you, and keep you living safe and whole. Nothing ever truly dies.

  Once the gates had shut behind them, shops and houses beamed within, their windows lit with red, happy fires. The Chernosvyat sprawled ahead, its black towers and red doors glinting. It looked so like the Kremlin that Marya had often thought the two must be brothers, separated at birth and set apart, one on either side of the world. Koschei lived in the biggest tower, its cupola drenched in garnets. But most folk lived somewhere in the Chernosvyat, in the smaller citadels and chapels and anterooms. The place grew by years, like a tree, like the house on Gorokhovaya Street—on Dzerzhinskaya Street. The old names swirled in Marya’s mind, flowing together and apart again until she could not remember which had come first.

  The broad plain hosted many other houses and halls and hearths and hostelries rippling out from the black Kremlin like water. Marya hardly noticed anymore that the houses and halls had been patched together from the skins of many exotic and familiar beasts, their roofs thatched with long, waving hair, their eaves lined with golden braids. Fountains spurted hot, scarlet blood into glass pools, trickling pleasantly in the late afternoon light. A rich steam floated from their basins, and the occasional raven alighted to sip. Once Marya had screamed when a bloody fountain geysered up in its noontime display. Once she had felt sick when she saw the wall of a chapel prickle up in a sudden wind, just like skin. But the fountain had been much embarrassed, and she had been introduced to the chapel, whose name was Avdotia, and these things now seemed only right and lovely to Marya, just living things in the Country of Life, where even a fountain breathed and fl
owed with vital stuff. That was so long ago now, anyway, like the dream of another life.

  “I think I am too tired for mushrooms, Nasha,” she said finally. “I will go to Koschei instead, and see if he has need of me. But,” she added magnanimously, “you may sleep with me tonight if you like, and have a tart with icing.” Did she enjoy punishing or rewarding more? Marya could not say. Everything in Buyan had a different pleasure to it, if only one learned how to find it.

  The vintovnik brightened and danced a little down the long cobbled road. Zemlehyed grunted and punched the ground with his mossy fist.

  “Cronyism!” he spat.

  8

  Sleep by Me

  In the deepest, most hidden room of the Chernosvyat, whose ossified cupolas shone here and there with silver bubbles and steel cruciforms, Koschei the Deathless sat on his throne of onyx and bone. His eyes drooped, redly exhausted, from weeping or working or both. Before him, on a great table formed from the pelvic dish of some impossibly huge fish, lay scattered maps and plans and letters, papers and couriers’ boxes, photographs and sketches, books wedged open, upside down, splitting their spines.

  Marya Morevna entered, her hunting costume half-open in the heat of the place. The dark walls of the Chernosvyat often seemed to breathe, and their breath came either brutally hot or mercilessly cold. Marya never knew which to expect. Silently, she walked around the long table and let a single golden feather drop. It drifted lazily down to rest on a requisition form. It no longer flamed, but glowed with a soft amber light.

  “I would have preferred it living, volchitsa,” said Koschei, without looking up.

  Marya shrugged. “It only died just now, as much of exhaustion from the hunt as the bullet.”

  Koschei rose from his papers and drew her to him, bending to kiss her collarbone.