Deathless

* * *

Marya’s feet slipped and skidded in the concave bowl, scrabbling for purchase. The mortar spun and lurched, trying to spill her out. It bucked, reared. It launched up into the air, flipped itself and slammed sharply down in the snow three times—but still Marya clung to the pestle, gritting her teeth, clawing at the smooth stone with her fingernails until they snapped and bled. When the mortar had gotten itself right side up again, she straddled the pestle between her legs like a broomstick, her knees knocking gently into the smooth grooves where Baba Yaga’s knees were accustomed to resting. The stone seethed, hot as a stove bottom, pulsing as though blood moved through it. Marya Morevna drove into it with her knees, her bones grinding painfully down against it, but still the mortar protested, trying to bounce hard enough to bash her head into its sides.

Marya wrapped one arm around the pestle, her thighs squeezing the trunk of it, and dug in her pocket. Hauling out a dried duck leg, she rolled it against the bowl of the mortar, to give the beast the scent of fatty, rich fowl, and then flung it down Skorohodnaya as hard as she could. The mortar leapt, ravenous, and hopped after it, up into the air and down again, leaving a trail of wide, deep stampings in the snow behind it, like an endless ellipsis.

Between her legs, the pestle rattled and shuddered, whipping her around the bowl. Pain flared white and black everywhere she slammed into stone, and then again, when her bruises got bruised.

“North, trash heap!” she hissed at the mortar, broadening her voice, shredding it. The mortar paused, confused again by her voice, which would never be as broad or shredded as its owner’s. Marya Morevna breathed deep, the stabbing cold flowing through her. I am not so stupid that I do not listen to you, Chairman Yaga! I know what this is about! She bore down on the pestle, letting it press lasciviously against her, its pulsating heat suffusing through her legs, her belly. She ground her bones against the thing, circling her hips, pushing at it, coaxing. She opened her legs wider, until it felt like a part of her, a stone Marya jutting out awkwardly from her body, swollen and wild. She swiveled herself so that the pestle pointed north and thrust forward. The mortar spun once more, in joy, thrilling to her touch—this was right, this was what it knew!—and bolted north, through the dark and the ice.

The wind cut right through her, lifting her chest out toward the starry trees. A kind of awful pleasure sliced through her: the pine air and the freezing moonlight; the warm, leaping pestle beneath her; and the soft pocking sounds of the mortar stamping the snow. All the small beasts of the forest shrank away from the road and the screaming laughter of Marya Morevna as the starlight whipped her red cheeks. She rode the mortar and pestle like a savage thing, ripping through the night.

* * *

The northern boundary of Buyan flows over a hilly, snowbound country. The earth there has never yet seen the sun. All year the ice crowds close around the three or four grass seeds that valiantly pray for the coming of light. Once, the leshiyi built a wall through the winter, so that the northern sea would know it was forbidden here. But like all stones touched by leshiyi, the wall sighed and dreamed and wished for more than it had, and all the while, silently grew. Now, only an archaeologist might be able to guess that the purple-black cliff with a dozen goats gnawing at its roof was once a wall, could see the old, vague shapes of bricks in the foot of the cliff. Could pick out the crack of a cavern, where the wall’s watchtower was once kept, from which alarms once rang down the valleys, rung by some mossy, granite-heavy soul.

The mortar, no archaeologist, but afflicted with a kind of dumb sympathy for the old wall, stone to stone, brought Marya Morevna right to the cavern, little more than a slit in the rock, like the thin triangle of darkness between the pages of a book left facedown on a white table. The mortar stomped three times in the snow and tipped forward, spilling Marya out into the tamped circle of firm snow in the midst of soft, hushed drifts. The pestle rolled around the bowl, purring, begging for approval. Marya thought of kissing it, but knew Chairman Yaga would not grace her beast so. She gave it another hard smack instead. The mortar snapped back upright, spinning in rapture.

Snowflakes blew into the crevice; three winds skipped in, howling hollow and hoarse. Marya Morevna’s black fur glittered, nearly white with clumps of ice. She ducked into the cave mouth, her skin still flushed from the riding, her breath steaming in the stony closet. The ceiling drooped low, stalagmites like drops of spittle teetering above her head as the floor sloped down, down, into the dark. How can I find a chest in all this blackness? Marya despaired, her hands groping in front of her, clutching at shadows.

“Haroo, Grandmother!” growled someone invisible, somewhere beyond Marya’s grasp. “Why do you stumble about so? Are you drunk again?”

“Gahvoo!” another raspy voice howled. “Someday you’ll sprout gills and learn to breathe vodka. And then we will miss you!”

“Guff, guff,” grumbled a third. “I shall light you a match on my teeth.” A phosphor-flash sparked, turning the cave w

alls green and white.

Four dogs panted amiably before Marya, their paws huge and bony in the ghostlight: a proud wolf slowly beating her thick tail against the cave floor; a starved racing hound licking his chops; a haughty lapdog, his curled fur fringing his face like a little mane; and a fat spotted sheepdog, her chin resting on two pillars of congealed saliva like long, thick teeth. Marya sucked in her breath. Behind them sat a glass chest, frosted over, glittering.

“Rup, rup!” yipped the lapdog. “You’re looking very fine tonight, Grandmother! Why, you’ve hardly any warts at all! Bathing in blood again, I’ll warrant. Virgins or capitalists this time?”

Marya could feel her eyeliner sticky around her lashes, her hair half-loose from its bun. I must look frightful—but then, frightful is what they expect. What they want.

“Virgins,” she snarled. The fat sheepdog leaned forward on her pillars of spit, which wobbled like jelly.

“Guff, guff! Your voice is so strong and loud, Grandmother!” she whined. “Last time you visited, you sounded like you’d swallowed six knives! How’d you get it so sweet?”

Marya bit her lip. “I, er, I drank up a songbird’s soul,” she barked. “Just cracked open her little chest and sucked the song right up, like marrow through a bone!” After a moment, she added, “As if it’s any of your business!”

“Haroo, Grandmother,” howled the wolf, her eyes round and cunning. “Your skin is so soft and smooth! Last time you visited, you looked like a crumpled page! You had more spots than a toadstool! How did you get it so supple?”

“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.”