Deathless Read online

  “I am proud of you, of course, beloved, baleful. But you must realize that you have only added a firebird to Viy’s cavalry. A black, flameless thing, its bony wings bearing ghost-pilots with their arms full of ordnance.”

  Marya Morevna shut her eyes, savoring his lips on her skin as she savored the slab of black bread, buttered and spread with roe, once, long ago.

  “It was hiding a clutch of eggs,” she breathed as he gripped her hair and tilted her head to show her throat, pale and bare. “In a short while we shall have enough firebirds to pull a siege tower, and still have one or two left over to light the hearth when we return.” His weight against her chilled and wakened her skin. She smiled against his dark glove. “Besides, it was tradition, once, for a suitor to fetch a firebird’s feather to show their good and marriageable qualities.”

  “I know your qualities.”

  Marya said nothing. She did not feel an urgency to marry, exactly—nothing like her sisters, who had longed for it like the prize at the end of a long and difficult game. But she did feel that as long as Koschei kissed her and kissed her and did not marry her, she remained a child in Buyan—a cosseted tsarevna, but not a Tsaritsa, not a native. A human toy. She did not care whether he gave her a ring—he had given her dozens, of every dark and glinting gem—but she did not wish to be a princess forever.

  Koschei picked up the knife he had been using to open couriers’ seals and looked up at her speculatively. Reaching up, he slowly sliced off the buttons of her hunting dress.

  “If you keep cutting at me I shall have no clothes left,” said Marya Morevna. The gems in her hair clattered against one another as he cupped her skull in one large hand. With the other, he cut away the skirt of her dress in a stroke, like peeling the skin off a red, red apple. His hands burned coldly on her. She felt, as she could always feel, the bones of him beneath the skin of his fingers, his hips. Then he hardened, his skin becoming warm and real and full. A skeleton, always, embraced her first, and then remembered to be a man. She understood—had he not told her? To be Deathless is to treat with death in every moment. To stave death is not involuntary, like breathing, but a constant tension, like balancing a glass on the head. And each day the Tsar of Life fought in his own body to keep death down like a chastened dog.

  Koschei dug his nails into the small of Marya’s naked back; blood welled in tiny drops. Marya cried out a little, her breath thin and quick, and he lifted his thumb to his lips, suckling at the little smear of her blood. His cheeks, always gaunt, hung with shadows, and he watched her with a starveling’s eyes. But that did not frighten her anymore. Her lover often looked starved, hounded. She could kiss those things from him, and often did, until his face waxed seraphic, soft, smooth—as anyone can do for her mate when the day is long and hard, and solace far off. She thought nothing of it now, of kissing him alive. Everything in this place was livid and lurid and living, and when he loved her and hurt her all at once she lived, too, higher and harder than she had thought she could. Yes, she thought, magic is like that, when it comes. Like the fountains of blood, the houses of skin and hair, Koschei had long since become home. So Marya smiled as he bit her shoulders, feeling infant bruises bloom invisibly under her skin. Tomorrow I shall wear them like medals, she thought as he lifted her up onto the wreckage of field maps and mechanical diagrams.

  “Koschei,” she whispered against his neck, where his dark hair curled. “Where do you keep your death?”

  Koschei the Deathless lifted the calves of Marya Morevna around his waist and sank into her with the weight of years. He moaned against her breast. It stopped her breath, how like a child the Tsar of Life became when he needed her. The power she had over him, that he gave her. Who is to rule, that is all.

  “Tell me,” she whispered. She wanted that, too. She wanted so much these days, everything she touched.

  “Hush, you Delilah!” He thrust against her, the bones of his hips stabbing at her soft belly.

  “I keep nothing from you. I befriend your friends; I eat as you eat; I teach you the dialectic! If you will not take me to wife, at least take me into confidence.”

  Koschei squeezed his eyes shut. He winced with the force of his secret, his climax, his need. As he gripped her tighter and tighter, Marya thought his face grew rounder, younger, as though breathing in her own youth.

  “I keep it in a glass chest,” he gasped finally, pushing her roughly back over the stacks of predicted troop movements, his fists caught up in the infinite mass of her hair. “Guarded by four dogs: a wolf like you, a starved racing hound, a haughty lap pup, and a fat sheepdog. All their names begin with the same letter, and only I know the letter.” He shut his eyes against her cheek as she arched toward him like a drawn bow. “And only someone who knows their names can reach the chest where I keep my death.”

  Koschei cried out as though he were dying. He leaned against his love, his chest shaking. She held him, like a baby, like her own. And it did not escape her that speaking of his death excited Koschei somewhere deep inside, as if the proximity of it, even the word itself, sizzled electric in his brain.

  “Will we win, Koschei?” she whispered. The room went suddenly frigid, frost gathering at the tall windows. “Will we win this war?”

  “War is not for winning, Masha,” sighed Koschei, reading the tracks of supply lines, of pincer strategies, over her shoulder. “It is for surviving.”

  * * *

  Naganya the vintovnik curled against Marya that night in Marya’s own bedchamber, which was curtained in wine red velvets and silks. Living in Marya’s little room was like living inside a heart. She liked it that way, though it gave Madame Lebedeva a headache. And she liked her privacy, to be among her own things. Her enormous bed, its four black pillars disappearing into the ceiling, sank both girls in pillows and down. Naganya, always warm to the touch, sighed in the shadows, and Marya Morevna held her tight so that Nasha would know she wasn’t angry anymore. Had never really been.

  “Tomorrow,” Naganya said, “it would be marvelous to go out into the central square and both of us shoot as far as we can, and then go running to see what we have shot! Once I played that game with a boy, and he shot a frog right through the throat. And the strangest, ugliest thing happened. The frog turned into a girl, and she started crying, all covered with mud and naked.” Naganya paused to allow Marya to be impressed. “She wore a green dress when they married, and made wedding bread like nothing you’d believe. The crust was all full of honey and sugar and hard little candied bilberries. She cried when the banns were read, too. The same tears as that day when he shot her. Perhaps she didn’t want to be married to him, but who would not want to be married to an expert marksman? I cannot believe it. She must have cried for some secret amphibian reason. Then her dress caught on fire while they danced, and there was a mess, but that’s neither here nor there.”

  “If we shoot in the city, we may hit someone who is not playing our game,” said Marya sleepily. The small of her back still burned pleasantly from Koschei’s nails.

  The vintovnik struck the pillow with her walnut fist. “That’s the fun of it! Ah, well, if you want to be a baby about it, we can go out into the wood. Probably won’t get anything but squirrels, and none of them ever turn into girls.”

  “All right, Nasha. And if I get a frog, she’s all yours.”

  The imp snuggled closer. “Do you still love me, then, Mashenka?”

  “Of course, Nashenka. Punishment doesn’t mean you aren’t loved. On the contrary. You can really only punish someone you love.”

  Naganya clicked her ironworks happily.

  Marya opened her eyes in the dark, staring up at the carved ceiling, which showed a scene of a great fringed wyrm beset by boyars. “Have I ever told you about the first time Koschei punished me?”

  “Koschei punished you?”

  “Oh yes, many times. But the first time was because he asked me not to speak, and I spoke anyway. I didn’t say anything much; I just told him I was feeling b
etter. But it wasn’t what I said, it was that I’d broken my word. Even if you think it was cruel of him to tell me not to speak, I had promised.”

  Naganya wriggled, fretting. Even though the punishment was long done, she could not help worrying for her friend.

  “And so when I first came to Buyan, he did not let me come into the Chernosvyat with him, or have supper, or meet any lovely rifle imps with names like mine. He left me at the stables to look after his horse because I had broken my promise.”

  “Well. You could still breathe, I’m sure.” Naganya could not help needling—it was her nature.

  “Some things are worse than not breathing,” Marya said softly. “When you are so far from home, and frightened, and have been sick a long time, and no one knows you at all, and you miss your mother and your old house, and you don’t know if you are to be married or killed, to be left in a stable alone without a word is very bad. But I got out the shovel all the same, even though the blade was half as tall as me. I mucked out the horse’s stall—and that beast makes a mess, I can tell you, all manure and exhaust and broken mufflers! After a while I was hardly crying at all, but my arms ached like death. I brushed his coat and rubbed him down with oil, with him snorting and his eyes glowing all the while. He was still white and cream-colored, as he was while I was sick.

  “‘Why do you change colors like that?’ I said, not expecting an answer. ‘It makes it hard to choose the right oil!’

  “And he rumbled at me, ‘I’m not the horse who fetched you in Petrograd. That is my sister, the Midnight Nag. Then you rode my brother, the Noontide Horse, who is red as sunrise. You and I have only just met. I am the Dawn Gelding, and you must ride all of us to get here. My name is Volchya-Yagoda.’

  “‘He named you wolf-food?’ I asked, since I didn’t know Koschei’s humor then.

  “Volchya snorted again, and sparks flew out of his nose. ‘Aren’t we all?’ he said.

  “I began to brush his horribly tangled mane. Every time I pulled his scalp he nipped me, and Volchya’s nips are like the bites of a sword. I wept a great deal, I recall. And in the cold, even weeping hurts. It comes in jerks and hitches, and your tears half freeze to your face. I didn’t know how to keep from crying then. When I finished, his hair shone red with my blood, and he looked like his brother. Night had gotten fat and black outside, and the city frightened me. Where did Koschei live? Where could I get food? Where could I drink or sleep? So I reshod Volchya, to put off having to decide those things. I pulled off his old tire-tread horseshoes and hammered on fresh iron ones. I knew how to do this, for when I was young and I wore a red scarf, we all had to learn to maintain the policeman’s horses after school. In case of another war, you understand. So I ran my hand along his fetlock—so soft and hot!—and he put his leg right into my hand. When I had finished, Volchya-Yagoda looked at me with those huge, fiery eyes and lay down right there in his clean stall.

  “‘Come,’ he said. ‘Sleep by me, and he will fetch you in the morning. Share my water trough and my oat bag.’

  “Well, Nasha, I drank and I ate, even though the oats were dry and tasteless. I found a sugar lump in the bag, and Volchya let me have it. I lay down next to his big white belly and shut my eyes. It was like sleeping next to the stove in my old house. Because, Nasha, even when you have been wicked, sometimes there is a warm bed and a warm friend somewhere, if only you know where to look. I learned that from Volchya, though I don’t think it’s precisely what I was meant to learn. And just as I was drifting off to sleep, broken and exhausted and still bleeding a little from a nip or two, Volchya-Yagoda said softly in my ear, ‘Sleep well, Marya Morevna. I think I like you best. None of the other girls gave me new shoes.’”

  “And did he come for you in the morning?”

  “Oh yes, and all was forgiven. You cannot punish someone unless you wish to forgive them, after all. What would be the point? And I told him what Volchya said.”

  “And? What did Papa say?”

  “He said, ‘You must have been mistaken. There have never been any other girls.’”

  In the dark, Naganya the vintovnik frowned and clicked her tongue against her teeth.

  Marya Morevna slept with her fists curled tight, held at the ready, next to her chin.

  9

  A Girl Not Named Yelena

  Madame Lebedeva exhaled a thin, fine curl of smoke from her cigarette, nestled in its ivory holster. She reclined in a plush blue chair, her angular body sheathed in a sleeveless gown of swan feathers, speckled with tiny glass beads. Madame busied herself with flamboyantly not eating her cucumber soup. Bits of chervil and tarragon floated in the green broth, lonely and unattended. Lebedeva leaned in confidentially, but she needn’t have—the crowded cafe produced enough din to hide any secret she cared to share.

  “I’m thrilled to my bones to be able to bring you here, Masha, dear.”

  Marya thanked her again. Madame Lebedeva had made up her eyes specially for their luncheon, or more precisely, for the komityet that controlled entry to the exclusive magicians’ restaurant. Her lids glittered, frosted with the lightest onion-green powder. She had chosen it to match the soup, which she had decided to order weeks ago. Marya could have eaten in the little chalet whenever she liked, of course, being forbidden nowhere in Buyan. But Lebedeva had earned her privilege, and hand in hand, the pleasure of lording her privilege over her friend. “I’m insensate with rapture, I tell you. It’s all on account of my having produced a cikavac, of course. A trifle, really. For one possessed of such grace as I, to conceal an egg under the arm for forty days and shun the confessional is barely worth mentioning! Such a dear little creature, too. But the reviews! Oh, they have savaged me, Masha!”

  “Savaged?”

  Lebedeva tapped her cigarette; ash drifted. “Savaged. They said it should have looked like a parakeet, not a ‘ridiculous miniature pelican.’ Apparently, I shouldn’t have cut my nails during the forty days, which is why it understands animal tongues but doesn’t grant wishes. And my selling it to that vodyanoy was an act of blatant mercantilism and I ought to be questioned. Critics, my darling, are never happy unless they are crushing something underfoot. A pelican! I ought to eat his eyes.”

  A waiter in a crisp white shirt appeared noiselessly at their side. He bowed with genteel solicitude. “More soup, Madame?” His bald head shone in the lamplight, save for the strip of wild white hair that flowed down the center of his skull like a horse’s mane. Lebedeva’s face blossomed.

  “How delightful to meet another vila! One’s countrymen are always a comfort. No, dear.” Madame Lebedeva smiled, her charm perfect, ripe, chill. She had practiced in the mirror for days. “I have a delicate constitution. Marya will certainly have another bowl of your captivating ukha, however! Humans are so robust. Is that sturgeon I smell in the broth?”

  “Very perceptive, Madame. And the chef sends his compliments on your production of Tuesday last. Pelicans will surely be all the rage next season.”

  Lebedeva scowled. The waiter turned his attention to Marya, his pale eyes moist with anticipation. For her own part, Marya wanted no more fish stew, though it warmed her with a delicate, salty, dill-rich flavor. She was quite full—but she loved to make Madame Lebedeva happy, and what made her happy, chiefly, was ordering others about.

  The waiter bent to speak more intimately with them. His skin smelled like frozen pine sap.

  “If Comrade Morevna would be interested, I myself have been working on a small glamour she might enjoy. It’s nothing, really,” he demurred before Marya could say anything at all. “But if you like it, perhaps you could whisper a word to the Tsar?”

  “I … I’m hardly a judge. I know nothing about the business of magicians.”

  “Marya,” whispered Lebedeva, “surely you know how this works. We took extensive notes on our visits to Moscow.”

  “Yes, but in Moscow this sort of cafe is for writers.” Lebedeva and the waiter both looked pleasantly perplexed, disliking to be shown up, but
gladdened all the same, certain now to receive a lesson from the source. “Writers?” Marya said encouragingly. Speaking to the folk of Buyan was like walking on ice—they could be conversing just as smoothly as you please, and then suddenly Marya would fall through into their alien ideas, shocked at what they did not know. “Novelists? Poets? Playwrights?” Lebedeva sucked on her cigarette, which never seemed to get smaller, no matter how much ash fell from it like snow.

  “I’m sure it sounds fascinating, dear. What are they, some sort of conjurers?”

  “No, no, they tell stories. Write them down, I mean.” Marya grabbed at her tea to buy a moment’s thought. Buyanites had an insatiable lust for information about the human world, but anything Marya told them became a daring new fashion, spreading like gossip. She had to be careful. “A playwright writes a story that other people act out. They memorize the story and pretend that they are the heroines and villains of it. A poet writes one that rhymes, like a song.” Marya grinned suddenly. She shut her eyes and recited, the words coming back to her like old friends:

  There, weeping, a tsarevna lies, locked in a cell.

  And Master Grey Wolf serves her very well.

  There, in her mortar, sweeping beneath the skies,

  the demon Baba Yaga flies.

  There Tsar Koschei,

  he wastes away,

  poring over his pale gold.

  The waiter tucked his cloth under an arm and applauded vigorously. Lebedeva clapped her hands. “Oh, superb! It’s about us! How gratifying to be so recognized.”

  Encouraged, Marya hurried on. “A novelist writes a long kind of story, with … a lot of smaller stories in it, and motifs, and symbols, and sometimes things in the story really happened, and sometimes they didn’t.”