Deathless

Marya was no fool. She could add two and two and two and come up with six—which is to say, add old grandmother and chicken legs and terrified waitstaff and come up with Baba Yaga. No magician outranked Baba Yaga. Her seat at the magicians’ cafe was sacrosanct, to say the least.

Outside, snow floated down a lacy path, so thick it obscured even the Chernosvyat, hunched dark and impregnable on the hill. Baba Yaga gave a bleating cry and leapt up into the air, her skinny legs scissoring beneath her. She landed hard on Marya’s shoulders, digging her heels into the girl’s armpits.

“Mush, girl! Mush!” she yelped. “A wife must be a good mount, eh?”

Marya’s knees trembled, but when she felt the snap of a goat-hide whip on her back, she stumbled ahead, running through the snow. Baba Yaga’s car snorted to life and hopped along behind her, nipping at her heels with its front bumper.

“That way, not-Yelen

a!” Baba Yaga hollered into the storm. Marya groaned like an old nag, and ran.

* * *

Marya’s mouth dripped saliva like an overworked horse. She rounded the snow-swept corner into a half-sheltered alley, her breathing shallow, rough, and fast. Baba Yaga hauled on her hair to stop her at the threshold of the door and vaulted off. Marya gasped with relief, the hot weight finally vanished from her back. She bent over, her heart wheezing, sweat pouring off of her, crawling in her scalp. A horse-bone door cut into the side of a blood-brown boar-skin building. Rubbish and smashed glass carpeted the thin street. The car honked happily, shuffling its chicken legs.

“In you go, and in I go,” chuffed Baba Yaga, her breath fogging. “And stay close—I want to see if you cry.”

They shouldered through the horse-femur door together. It towered over them both. Within, a yawning factory floor opened up below an iron balcony. They peered over the railing, the screws and bolts groaning with the leaden weight of Baba Yaga. Below, dozens upon dozens of girls worked away at looms the size of army trucks, their fingers flashing in and out of strands of linen, their shuttles racing their hands. Most of the women were blond, their hair braided in a tidy crown around their heads. Only a few dark ones, like Marya, dotted the sea of pale gold. They wore identical blackberry-colored uniforms. The old woman beamed like a holiday morning.

“Every one of those pretty little things is named Yelena. Oh—I’m sorry. That one is Vasilisa. And that one. And that plump one in the corner … and the tall one with her dolly still in her pocket. How sweet.”

Marya wiped her sodden brow. Her calves burned thickly. “What are they doing?” she panted.

“Oh, this is a wartime facility. Didn’t you know? Doesn’t your lover tell you just everything? They’re weaving armies. Noon and midnight, and no days off for good behavior. See? There, one is coming off the line just now.”

Directly below them, one of the looms and one of the Yelenas were finishing off the helmet on a soldier. He was as flat as paper, but perfect, his uniform crisp, his eyes serenely shut, his rifle at the ready. The shuttle scooted back and forth, weaving in the last of his helmet’s spike. When it was done, the Yelena opened up the leg of his trousers and blew hard into it, first the right, then the left. The soldier inflated, his nose popping into shape, muscles plumping in his thighs. He sat up stiffly and, with much creaking of new stitches, marched to the rear of the room, where the blocking baths awaited.

“They’re not alive, see,” explained Baba Yaga. “Well, not properly alive. Not alive like a frog or my car. It’s all so Viy can’t pull his old trick of killing our folk like he’s getting paid per pint, then turning around and lining them up in his own formations. When you stab one of these poor bastards, they just unravel. Good trick, yes? Can’t say my brother’s not clever.”

“Comrade Yaga—”

Baba Yaga whirled on her, the tails of her fur coat whipping around. “Don’t you call me comrade, little girl. We aren’t equals and we aren’t friends. Chairman Yaga. That comrade nonsense is just a hook by which the low pull down the high. And then what do you get? Everyone rolling around in the same shit, like pigs.”

Marya fought to keep her voice strong and deep. She would not show fear in front of this wolf of a woman. “Chairman Yaga. Why did you bring me here?”

Baba Yaga grinned, showing all her teeth. Her black fur coat had heads on it, Marya suddenly noticed, three of them—slit-eyed minks, their muzzles frozen in a triplicate of snarling. “To show you your future, Comrade Morevna! Koschei, my insatiable brother, abducted all those girls—from Moscow, from Petrograd, from Novgorod, from Minsk. Spirited them from their cozy little homes, barreled them through the snow, telling them what to eat, how to kiss, when to speak, bathing them when they fell sick, just so they’d love him and need him—oh, my brother does yearn to be needed! He needs so much himself, you see. And then, well, what always happens with husbands? A few of them he got bored of; some of them betrayed him, stealing his death or running off with preverbal bogatyrs with necks like hams. And then they steal his death. Oh, the vixens! They were shameless. Anyway, it doesn’t matter. My brother always ends up dead in the end. Oh, the funerals I’ve had to attend! And flowers and gifts for each of them! I’m half-bankrupt with his theatrics. It never takes, though. That’s what deathless means. It’s only his death that dies. Koschei goes on and on. None of those milk-assed girls down there understood it, even though he practically wears a letter of intent on his chest. They snatch up his death and break it open and stomp on it like the curs they are, but what can you do? A dog is a dog. She only knows how to bite and eat. But most of them, Marya—my, what a black, soft name! I could lie in it all day—most of them couldn’t get by me to begin with. Family is a thorny, vicious business, and Koschei can’t marry without my say-so. Those stupid ox-wives weren’t fit to sweep my floor! They couldn’t even fire an arrow through the eye of a needle! What good is a wife who can’t, I ask you? I’ve done him a thousand favors.” Baba Yaga reached into her coat and pulled out a cigarillo. She chomped on its end and spat, rolling it over between her lips. “So there they sit. They don’t get any older—the elderly make terrible workers, I ought to know. Never like to do half a day’s work when I can do none, myself. And they don’t die. That Yelena there—with the mole on her neck!—she’s been here, oh, since the days of Knyaz Oleg. Lenochka!” Chairman Yaga called down, and blew the seamstress a smoky kiss. The girl did not look up from the rifle she wove. “I’m sure we’ve got room in here for you somewhere, Marya! After all, what kind of babushka would I be if I left even one of my babies out in the cold?”

Marya’s eyes blurred with tears. She felt dizzy; another step and she’d topple over the edge of the balcony. All of them? All of them had loved Koschei, slept in his huts? Snuggled with vintovniks? Learned to be cold?

“He said there were no others, not ever. He said I misheard Volchya-Yagoda, and I was his only love.” But more than the lie she had been told, Marya’s heart could not absorb the ugliness of her lover keeping these girls prisoner, year after year, like a treasure hoard.

“Husbands lie, Masha. I should know; I’ve eaten my share. That’s lesson number one. Lesson number two: among the topics about which a husband is most likely to lie are money, drink, black eyes, political affiliation, and women who squatted on his lap before and after your sweet self.”

Marya covered her face in her hands. She could not bear to look at the Yelenas and Vasilisas. To think of them wrapped up in mustard plasters, or opening their mouths to receive bread and roe. And worse, never going home, never looking up from work that could never, never be done.

“Hounds and hearthstones, girl, haven’t you ever heard a story about Koschei? He’s only got the one. Act One, Scene One: pretty girl. Act One, Scene Two: pretty girl gone!”

“I didn’t think it meant anything.” I thought the stories were about me, somehow. That I was a heroine. That the magic was for me. “They don’t even know what writers are, here!”

Baba Yaga softened, as much as she could soften. Her braided eyebrows creased together gently. “Doesn’t mean we don’t know what stories are. Doesn’t mean we don’t walk in them, every second. Chyerti—that’s us, demons and devils, small and big—are compulsive. We obsess. It’s our nature. We turn on a track, around and around; we march in step; we act out the same tales, over and over, the same sets of motions, while time piles up like yarn under a wheel. We like patterns. They’re comforting. Sometimes little things change—a car instead of a house, a girl not named Yelena. But it’s no different, not really. Not ever.” Baba Yaga pressed the back of her withered hand to Marya’s cheek. “That’s how you get deathless, volchitsa. Walk the same tale over and over, until you wear a groove in the world, until even if you vanished, the tale would keep turning, keep playing, like a phonograph, and you’d have to get up again, even with a bullet through your eye, to play your part and say your lines.”

Marya’s tears trickl

ed off her cheeks and dripped through the iron balcony grate. One splashed upon a Vasilisa’s red hair. She did not move, even a little. Oh, I will do something, something, Marya thought with a fury like a fever. When I am Tsaritsa I will break all these machines and I will set them free. “If you’re here to decide if I can marry, why have you waited so long? I’ve been here nearly a year. I’ve believed him for a year!”

Baba Yaga withdrew her hand. Stamping out her cigarillo on the balcony rail, she straightened her back.

“Lenin died,” she said curtly. “He’s better at it than my brother. His death stuck to him. What should I have done? I went to dance on his coffin. I owed him at least that. No one saw me, of course. After all these years, I’m nimble enough to step under the wind. The horns played and the dirges sang and I danced on his ugly glass coffin—like Snow White, the bald devil! I wonder, if I kissed him, would he wake up?”