Deathless

“You don’t mean that.” The air between them was thick, knotted.

“I don’t mean it.” He pushed her back, away from the black feast table, against a long, broad wall all covered in silver tapestries showing peacocks and apples and archangels with long teeth. Save for the long chains hanging from the eyes of one peacock’s tail. “I don’t mean it. Stay with me forever, forever, until you die, and then, still, I will keep your bones and clutch them to my breast.” He lifted one of her arms and clapped it into the chain. Marya knew those chains. She owned them, had tamed them. Though she wanted to speak plainly, calmly, her heart leapt as the locks caught. Her breath found itself. She searched his eyes, ducking her head to catch his gaze.

“Koschei, it’s me. Your Masha, your Marousha. What do I want with wounded babies?”

He bound up her other arm against the silver brocade, and Marya hung there, helpless. But her blood and her wanting lashed themselves, and of all the times she had hung against Koschei’s wall, she knew that this time she was not helpless at all. His fear wrote itself on every familiar angle of his face.

“But if you go with him, you will not be safe. Viy will not always respect our treaties. The accords only keep you alive—they do not keep you happy, or unmaimed, or those you love anything near safe. I bargained for you, not for any other. If you leave me, he will come for you one day with silver shears, and you will fall. If he were not a coward and bound by me, he would have done it already.”

“You do not need to send me away for my own good like a child. I chose to fight, and I still choose it.” But as she said it Marya Morevna knew she lied. She wanted an end to war. An end to cold and blackness and half the road gone silver with death.

Koschei went to an armoire and took out a long birch branch, white and thin.

“I meant to give you a life of greed and plenty,” he said, moving the branch over the tops of her breasts. “I wanted to keep you innocent, so that I would always have your purity to eat, every breakfast and every supper. You can be innocent again. It’s not true, what they say, that you can never get it back. You can. It’s only that most folk cannot be bothered.” Koschei the Deathless hooked his fingers into the glittering neckline of her dress and tore it with deliberation, down to the hem. Tiny gems clattered to the floor. Marya shut her eyes; her body arched toward him, the little striped animal that it had become, desperate and starving, always. This, this kept her here. Alive, aflame. At the end of fighting this wall, this man, these chains woke her heart again.

“You should go with him. He will ask tonight, I think. I would ask tonight. There is a reason they all leave me for Ivans. I can never b

e an Ivan. I can never roll with you in the sun like a mindless golden pup. I am too old for it, for warmth and simplicity. I burn, I freeze; I am never warm. I am rigid; I forgot softness because it did not serve me.” He brought the branch down against her breasts, and the sear of it tore a cry from her. She felt her skin rising up into a scarlet welt, the molten fire of the pain showing on her flesh. Yes, I am still alive, she thought. “When I say forever,” Koschei whispered, “I mean until the black death of the world. An Ivan means just the present moment, the flickering light of it, in a green field, his mouth on yours. He means the stretching of that moment. But forever isn’t bright; it isn’t like that. Forever is cold and hard and final.” He lashed her again, across her stomach, and she smiled, arching her back to receive the next blow on her hip bones, the seeping fire of it churning, unbearable. For a moment Marya did remember being happy and sad, the pleasure of roe and pickled melons, the night in the bathhouse when she was so ill. Koschei brought down the branch again and again on her belly, and she understood. That belly, which could bear children for an Ivan but never for him, that made her different than him, that made her human, not chyerti.

Tears streamed down Marya Morevna’s face. She chased after her breath, caught it, calmed it, and Koschei paused, his head hung low as an old wolf.

“Koschei, Koschei,” she whispered. “What would I have been if I had never seen the birds? I am no one; I am nothing. I am a blank paper on which you and your magic wrote a girl. Just the kind of girl you wanted, all hungry and hurt and needing. A machine for loving you. Nothing in me was not made by you. I was six when the rook came—six! That’s my whole life that you’ve bent in your hands. What could I have grown up to be? What kind of human woman, what kind of simple, happy thing? If I had never been broken on a bird’s wing. If I had never seen the world naked. I want to be myself again. I want to be six. I want to stop knowing everything I know. Ivan looks like the life that you stole from me.”

And the Tsar of Life roared with agony, shaking his head from side to side like a bull. He struck the wall with his fist, and black dust crumbled from the crater it made. He bit the long neck of Marya Morevna, but she did not bleed. Her skin had hardened, become strong, become impenetrable. And she could not help thinking, How many times have you played this scene, old man? It’s new and raw for me, but not for you, no.

“If I go with him,” she said, her voice low and shaking with the thing she did not want to say but had to, “will you put me in the factory with the Yelenas?” But what she truly asked him was forgiveness, some forgiveness for her greatest failure, that she had done nothing for the Yelenas, that the war had distracted her and she had failed, had been faithless, had abandoned them because her friends were dead and her goodness broken.

Koschei dropped the branch quietly and put his hands over his face. For a moment, Marya thought he wept. But then he snarled and bellowed and leapt on her with such a ferocity she thought he might bite her in half. He tore at his own clothes and pushed her legs apart until her hips groaned, entering her with no gentleness, but as a king enters an enemy hall. He climbed her body and clawed at it, and Marya shook violently, in pleasure, in pain, in fear of him, in adoration.

“Yes,” he growled, “yes, I will put you there and turn out the light in your eyes and come to stare at you for centuries, to pore over you, because you are mine, my treasure, my hoard, and I cannot keep you and I cannot let you go.”

He thrust against her over and over, his growls echoing. At the last moment, crying out into her like a broken thing, Marya saw his face wither for a moment, becoming impossibly old, old as stone, his hair white, his eyes sunken into a bleached skull, only his teeth remaining, sharp and cruel and ready.

18

What We Carry Between Us

Once, two years, two months, and two days after her wedding day, after three funerals with brown, green, and white coffins, after the battle of the Chernosvyat, in which Marya was wounded in the left thigh and the whole of the north tower withered, died, and sprang up silver in Viy’s possession, Marya Morevna had gone to visit the factory. She crept through the streets of Buyan at night and looked neither at the dead fishmongers sitting on their morbid stoop, smoking and drinking dust from crystal glasses, nor at the tavern she had once loved, now washed in silver, full of ghosts singing revolutionaries’ songs. They were part of the other Buyan now, and she could not bear to listen, even if it were at all safe to let one eye slip sideways, to look into the windows of the dead city.

Marya remembered the way. The path burned in her memory, phosphor popping and hissing. How much easier, with a straight back free of a cackling rider. The bone door, the sound of clicking looms within. The moon moved in the sky like a railway car, and the young bride slipped inside, onto the great iron balcony she had shared with Baba Yaga in another lifetime, when she did not know the color of a dead man’s blood. Green globes lit the place: the broad, tiled floor; the long, thin windows; the stacks of finished cloth snipers and infantry and cavalry officers with organdy horses in the corners. Even in the dregs of the night, brightness touched the head of every Yelena, dozens of them, heads bent to leaping shuttles, hurtling looms. Marya climbed down the iron staircase, her heart in her throat. No one marked her. No one looked up. She could not see a foreman, though every few moments, small breaths interrupted the clacking of the machines as a girl blew into one of the cloth soldiers and the cloth soldier took his or her first breath, which was really that poor Yelena’s breath, traveling from cuff to mouth.

Marya Morevna crouched down at the side of one of the women. Her hair, brown as good walnuts, was braided into a circle at the nape of her slender neck, and her fingers moved so fast, so terribly fast! She already had half a girl’s torso finished, her darned arm clutching a sniper’s rifle. The Yelena—or was she a rare Vasilisa? Marya could not be sure—did not turn her head. Her eyes were filmed with milky gold, her irises invisible, and she never blinked, not once.

“Yelena,” Marya whispered. “Is your name Yelena?”

The girl kept weaving, her fingers flashing like fish darting under water. Marya touched her arm. Her skin was warm. “Yelena?”

The milky gold caul over her eyes swirled and shifted, but the girl did not speak.

“Oh, please wake up. Please!” Impulsively, having not the smallest idea why, Marya rose a little and kissed the girl on the temple. Marya’s lips pressed on the girl’s warm, soft skin, her fine, downy wisps of hair. Wasn’t that how you woke up a sleeping princess? “Please wake up,” Marya whispered again.

But the girl did not. She froze, threads frazzling and sliding out of their pattern. She folded her hands in her lap but did not look up or speak, and the gold film did not thin.

“Yelena? Can you hear me? Is anyone left inside you? I’m so afraid, Yelena. Did he love you? Did you leave him? Did he chain you against the silver tapestries? Did you like his kisses? Were you happy here? Did you know a boy named Ivan? Do you want to go home? How long was it, between the time when you were happy, and the time when you wanted to kill him?” Marya swallowed hard. “He told me to forget you, to be selfish, to be cruel, to be a demon. But I dream about you, and in my dreams you carry water for Baba Yaga, and have a firebird hanging in a golden cage, and Koschei loves you as much as he loves me.”

The girl stared at her folded hands.

“What if I said, Go, Yelena, I will not sound the alarm. Run, get out, fly!”