Deathless

Marya put down her fork. “Why are you doing this, Koschei? I have had lovers before. You have, too. Remember Marina? The rusalka? She and I swam together every morning. We raced the salmon. You called us your little sharks.”

The Tsar of Life held his knife so tightly Marya could see his knucklebones bulging. “Were any of them called Ivan? Were any of them human boys all sticky with their own innocence? I know you. I know you because you are like me, as much like me as two spoons nested in each other.” Her husband leaned close to her, the candlelight sparking in his dark, shaggy hair. “When you steal them, they mean so much more, Marousha. Trust me. I know. What did I do wrong? Was I boring? Did I ignore you? Did I not give you enough pretty dresses? Enough emeralds? I’m sure I have more, somewhere.”

Marya lifted her hand and laid it on her husband’s cheek. With a blinking quickness, she drove her nails deep into his face. “Don’t you dare speak to me like that. I have worn nothing but blood and death for years. I have fought all your battles for you, just as you asked me. I have learned all the tricks you said I must learn. I have learned not to cry when I strangle a man. I have learned to lay my finger aside my nose and disappear. I have learned to watch everything die. I am not a little girl anymore, dazzled by your magic. It is my magic, now, too. And if I have watched all my soldiers die in front of me, if I have only been saved by my rifle and my own hands, if I have drunk more blood than water for weeks, then I take the human boy who stumbled into my tent and hold him between my legs until I stop screaming, you will not punish me for it. Are we not chyerti? Are we not devils? I will not even hear your punishment, old man.”

Koschei grabbed her hand, dragging her by her wrist from her chair and into his lap. The dishes clattered and spilled pears onto the floor. Blood streaked her palm where his nails scratched her, and he kissed it, kissed her thumb, her ring finger, until his chin was smeared red. “How I adore you, Marya. How well I chose. Scold me; deny me. Tell me you want what you want and damn me forever. But don’t leave me.”

Marya studied him, searching his face, so dear, unchanging, unchangeable. Ivan reached for her hand under the table, but she had forgotten him. She felt his fingers no more than a napkin folded across her skin. Koschei loomed so great in her vision, all shadows. He filled her up, her whole world, a moon obliterating the light of any other star. She thatched her fingers into his hair like a ram’s wool. “Take my death away,” she said. “Cut it away. Cut it up, lock it in a duck’s eye. Behind four dogs. Make me like you, as if we are two spoons. Then I will never leave you.” Koschei gently

took her hand from his head and laid it in her lap. “Would it not be better for your war-mistress to be as deathless as you? I am not safe because of a treaty. Viy’s fear of you is no shield, not really. I am naked and far from you most of the year. Open my bones and scoop out my death. Bury it at the center of the earth. I deserve so much. You know what I deserve.”

“You have asked me this before. I cannot.”

“You took my will.”

“So all seductions go. One will presented to another, wrapped in a bow. The question is always who is to take and who is to give. I took first, that’s all. You will take last. I am better at such games than you, but students wax in their talents, always, always. Your death you cannot give me by opening your pretty mouth and tasting roe. And I will not take it.”

“Yet you demand my loyalty, my whole heart, my marrow.”

“Those things are mine. You don’t understand, Masha. You have never understood. You are my treasure, my pale gold, the heart of my heart. You lie at the bottom of my being and gnaw upon my roots. But you are not one of us. No matter how like us you become. You were not with us when the world was so young, so easily misled. When there was only one star in the sky. You cannot know what we know. You are not built as we are built. You’ve learned so much, you have, and I am so proud of you. But you…” Koschei laid his hand on the black silk of her sternum. “You are still made of meat, and gristle, and bone.”

She searched his eyes, without depth, without end. How she loved him, still, forever. He was the source of that hot, sickening, gorgeous magic, and he poured it into her like wine. “What are you made of?” she asked, her bitter anger softening. Perhaps I can stand this war for you a little longer. If I can keep you by me, and Ivan, too. No rules, not ever.

“Not meat,” Koschei said gently. “Not even blood.” He took up her fingers again, passing them over his lips so that their bloody stains left smears there. “I put on blood for you like a cosmetic, just like I put on this face, and this body all full of leanness and litheness. It is to please you, only to please you, my human girl, my volchitsa. Didn’t you know? Didn’t you guess? But it’s no good, Masha. You carry your death in every cell of you. Every tiny mote in your body is dying, faster than sleight of hand. You are always dying, every second. How could I take that out of you? My death is not so diffuse. I have only one. You have millions. Not even my sister, my darling sister whom you know so well, not even Yaga asks me to take her death. Do you know why?”

Marya Morevna kept silent. She could think of only one thing; her whole mind clutched it: What do you look like without your face? Who are you, husband? I will see it. I will.

“Because she knows how I did it to myself. You would not think it of her, that she could be tender. But we were so young then, and there is a kind of understanding between brothers and sisters. A history shared. I will not tell you, my love. You are what you are and I think you might try it, just to show me you could. I will say it was something like how you came here with me, and something like letting a wolf eat my liver every day for a thousand years, and something like slowly suffocating in a gas the color of jaundice, and something like dying every second, to avoid ever dying. There is still a place in me, Masha, where my death once lay. I have a pain there, the way some men feel their legs long after they’ve been cut off at the knee. It is my pain, and I cannot share it. I would not, even if I could. I will age with you, if it will please you. I will match you, wrinkle for wrinkle, grey hair for grey hair, creak for creak, tumor for tumor. You will be so beautiful when you are old.”

“Death hath no dominion,” said Ivan, and both Marya and Koschei turned to stare at the young man as if he had appeared out of nowhere. Marya’s attention was a cat’s attention, now. Whatever she wanted most held her utterly, so that she abandoned emphatically anything other than the object of her fixation. And then something new would appear and she clapped it with the same impenetrable stare. She knew herself, how she had slowly, over years, become a cat, a wolf, a snake, anything but a girl. How she had wrung out her girlhood like a death. And now Ivan sat there, studiously not eating his bread smeared thickly with butter, waiting for her attention, her regard, but she could forget him in a moment if Koschei pulled her towards him like a little moon, and she knew it, and she felt herself splitting and tearing between them, her human heart, her demon heart.

“Well said,” Koschei allowed him, generosity coating his words. “Please, boy, eat. I promise, no one will appear and cackle at you that you must now stay here six months of the year. You must be starving for a glistening bit of meat.”

Ivan stared at the butter, how it shone. “You said this was the devil’s country.”

“So I did. Then I must be the devil. And she the devil’s bride. Aren’t you lucky, to have fallen in with such exciting people?”

Marya tried to help him. She remembered when this was hard. “He’s only teasing you, Ivan.”

Koschei snarled suddenly, his lips drawing back from sharp and suddenly yellowish, blackened teeth. He threw his goblet against the wall. It did not shatter, but thudded heavily to the floor.

“Not that name,” he growled. “Not in my house. Call him something else, if you insist on dragging home strays.”

Marya rose from his lap, her loose hair falling towards his face like a leash. He would deny her, no matter what he said. She did not feel a pain where his denial sat, not anymore. In fact, Marya did not feel much of anything besides want, an endless want that coiled in her, that lashed out for Koschei, for wine and goose and melon, for the hilt of her bone rifle. The want survived any fight, with her fists, with her guns. It was a wolf, tenacious. It had swallowed up Ivan Nikolayevich. She could not remember, now, ever having felt happy or sad. Only hungry. Only empty, and greedy, and insatiable. It was as though she had never taken off that leather apron, that black fur coat, that terrible red paint.

Koschei kept her hand, tight in his cold fist.

“Don’t leave me,” he said helplessly. “No rules but that rule. Don’t leave me.”

* * *

Koschei the Deathless allowed Ivan to sleep in Marya’s house. He liked to show magnanimity. He liked to be expansive, so long as he didn’t really have to share in the end. Thus Marya was not surprised when he caught her by a length of hair and drew her back to him once Ivan’s golden head had disappeared down the hall of the Chernosvyat. He wound her hair in his hand, running his thumb over it.

“All my onyxes, my agates, my obsidian. All my black treasures in this one strand,” Koschei murmured. “How long your hair has grown. You could strangle a man in it.”

Marya took her hair from his fist and lifted it, heavy as a rope, twisting it around his neck, bringing his face close to hers. He smelled like barley and old trees. But then, maybe he smelled that way only because it pleased her. Marya Morevna shivered in her husband’s arms. He pressed his forehead to hers, shutting his long-lashed eyes.

“You should go with him,” Koschei whispered harshly, “when he asks you. You should go, and have his babies and kiss their wounds and teach them to read.”