Deathless (10 page)

“Squirrel crap! Smashed snail’s got more sense than you,” growled Zemlehyed. “Papa can’t marry nobody. Not ’til
she
approves. Not ’til Babushka comes.”

“I wish she’d get a move on!” sighed Madame Lebedeva. She nibbled a bit of blackened onion. “I want to apply for the magicians’ dacha this summer. It’s quite competitive, and I can’t concentrate on my application while I’m worried half to death over Masha’s trousseau. The entrance essays are
brutal,
darlings.”

Naganya sniggered. “What’s a Petrograd girl’s trousseau? Horse shit and half a pint of Neva washing water?”

“I’m sure it’s no business of an imp,” Lebedeva snarled. “Leave it to those of us with a teaspoon of refinement to spare.”

“As if a vila witch knows anything but hair curlers and squinting for fortunes in a cup of piss!”

Naganya narrowed her monocled eye and spat. A neat little bullet erupted out of her mouth and punched through Madame Lebedeva’s swan feathers, blowing her hat quite off her head. She shrieked in indignation, her ice-white hair singed black at the tips. Madame scrambled after her hat.

“You
beast
! Marya! You
must
punish her! You made her swear not to shoot anyone this morning, and just look at her thwarting you!”

Marya Morevna pulled on a very solemn expression. She beckoned the vintovnik to her side with a crooked, jeweled finger.

“Nasha, you know you ought not to disobey me.”

Naganya fell silent. Her hands trembled; her ironworks clicked nervously in her cheek.

Suddenly, Marya’s hand flashed out and caught Naganya’s mouth and nose. With the other hand she grabbed the back of the vintovnik’s head. Naganya’s chest heaved, searching for breath, but Marya did not let go. She forced the imp to the ground, clamping her face in her fierce hand, leaping astride her, the better to pin her to the forest floor. Marya’s heart leapt and exulted in her. All unbidden she thought of a book of poems tossed into the snow, and a red scarf torn in half. She bore down harder. Slowly, black, oily tears pooled in Nasha’s eyes and trickled down over Marya Morevna’s knuckles as Nasha struggled, squirmed, and finally went still beneath her. Marya grinned, her braids brushing her friend’s walnut arms. Finally, she let Naganya up. The imp gasped and spluttered, chagrined and hoarse, wiping at her tears.

“Let that be a lesson,” Marya Morevna said cheerfully. “Mind your trigger in mixed company! When I tell you to do something you must do it.”
Perhaps all a Tsaritsa is is a beautiful cold girl in the snow, looking down at someone wretched, and not yielding.
Marya thought these thoughts, her breath and pulse calming. Of late, she had felt that coldness in herself, and though she feared it, she loved it too, for it made her strong.

Naganya sat shaking. Her breath came in gulps. She sniffed pitifully and pawed at her nose.

“Oh, Nasha!” Marya cried, feeling suddenly not cold at all and a little embarrassed. Perhaps she had gotten carried away—but imps listened to no one who could not thrash them soundly. A good Tsaritsa speaks her subjects’ language, after all. “Don’t be sad! I’ll find you a nice rusalka to snatch out of her lake in the middle of the night and throttle for information! Won’t that be lovely?”

Naganya smiled a little, mollified. A high walnut-colored blush rose in her cheeks, and Marya knew that she had enjoyed being punished, if only a little. She turned to the leshy.

“Now, Zemya—oh, give me back that book! You’ve bitten it half to pieces! Zemya, who is this Babushka you mean? I thought I had met everyone here!”

At that moment, a high, gorgeous cry echoed through the forest. An orange flame circled the clouds, so far up in the air that it seemed little more than a speck of fiery dust. Before Naganya could shout, Marya had snatched up her rifle, knelt, and fired.

With a searing, crackling crash, a firebird fell from the sky.

*   *   *

“Why
do
they call this place the Isle of Buyan?” Marya mused as the four of them strode back down Skorohodnaya Road. The sun set over the city ahead, spilling light over warm white cupolas carved from smooth, gleaming bone. The first dusting of snow glinted on the road, promising the sweetness of winter to come. “It’s not an island at all, as far as I can tell.”

“Used to be one,” said Zemlehyed, who was by far the oldest of them. “The unstopping salt sea. Your Lake Baikal?
Tscha!
Puddle!
Our
sea had fists, back in the yore.”

“It continues to be a marvel to me,” said Madame Lebedeva, her musical voice causing even her white horse to step lighter, “that leshiyi ever learned to speak. What sort of process was it, I wonder? Did a lonely hedgehog bash on a rock until it made noises?”

“Leshiyi learned from trees singing songs what birds taught, what birds learned from worms, what worms learned from dirt, what dirt learned from diamonds.
Pedigreed,
that’s us.”

“Well, I’m sure
you
were a very poor student, Zemya. You haven’t got the vocabulary of a salamander. In any event, Masha, darling, the Isle of Buyan was once, indeed, an island, in a great sea where fish the size of galleons swam in golden waves. They sang, those fish, such songs at sunrise. If you had a hundred balalaikas and a thousand gusli, you could not play a song equal to the least of theirs.”

“What happened?” Marya Morevna coaxed her black horse on ahead. He pulled a silver net behind him. Flaming feathers tufted out of it at every angle, scorching the earth beneath it as it dragged along.

Madame Lebedeva sighed. “What happens to anything beautiful? Viy ate it up. First the great fish went belly up, one by one, their stomachs practically islands themselves. Then the water turned black and green, with mud currents all through it. Then the waves caught fire, and burned down to the seabed. The flames seared the stars—and then it was gone. Vapor and steam. All the whole of it, gone down into the coffers of the Tsar of Death. You can bet that in
his
country, there’s a ghost-sea full of ghost-fish still singing their songs, in a different key, with different words. And in our country, if you walk far enough out onto the plain, you’ll see great bones sticking out of the earth where the seabed used to be. Mountains lined with rib bones, valleys full of jaws.”

Marya rode in silence. Each time she learned something of the long history of Koschei’s country and the war with the Tsar of Death, she loved Buyan a little more fiercely, and feared the war a little more sharply.

“Shall we go mushroom picking tonight?” said Naganya softly, still abashed and thrilled by her punishment. “There’ll be a moon out, big as a bull’s-eye. And I’ve a belly for chanterelles.”

The motley party passed through the city gate, a palisade of tangled, towering antlers, each prong crowned with a grinning skull. Marya no longer thought it grisly or shuddered as she passed beneath the empty eye sockets. Now, the skulls seemed to smile at her, to say,
We who were once living can guard you still, and love you, and keep you living safe and whole. Nothing ever truly dies.

Once the gates had shut behind them, shops and houses beamed within, their windows lit with red, happy fires. The Chernosvyat sprawled ahead, its black towers and red doors glinting. It looked so like the Kremlin that Marya had often thought the two must be brothers, separated at birth and set apart, one on either side of the world. Koschei lived in the biggest tower, its cupola drenched in garnets. But most folk lived somewhere in the Chernosvyat, in the smaller citadels and chapels and anterooms. The place grew by years, like a tree, like the house on Gorokhovaya Street—on Dzerzhinskaya Street. The old names swirled in Marya’s mind, flowing together and apart again until she could not remember which had come first.

The broad plain hosted many other houses and halls and hearths and hostelries rippling out from the black Kremlin like water. Marya hardly noticed anymore that the houses and halls had been patched together from the skins of many exotic and familiar beasts, their roofs thatched with long, waving hair, their eaves lined with golden braids. Fountains spurted hot, scarlet blood into glass pools, trickling pleasantly in the late afternoon light. A rich steam floated from their basins, and the occasional raven alighted to sip. Once Marya had screamed when a bloody fountain geysered up in its noontime display. Once she had felt sick when she saw the wall of a chapel prickle up in a sudden wind, just like skin. But the fountain had been much embarrassed, and she had been introduced to the chapel, whose name was Avdotia, and these things now seemed only right and lovely to Marya, just living things in the Country of Life, where even a fountain breathed and flowed with vital stuff. That was so long ago now, anyway, like the dream of another life.

“I think I am too tired for mushrooms, Nasha,” she said finally. “I will go to Koschei instead, and see if he has need of me. But,” she added magnanimously, “you may sleep with me tonight if you like, and have a tart with icing.” Did she enjoy punishing or rewarding more? Marya could not say. Everything in Buyan had a different pleasure to it, if only one learned how to find it.

The vintovnik brightened and danced a little down the long cobbled road. Zemlehyed grunted and punched the ground with his mossy fist.

“Cronyism!” he spat.

8

Sleep by Me

In the deepest, most hidden room of the Chernosvyat, whose ossified cupolas shone here and there with silver bubbles and steel cruciforms, Koschei the Deathless sat on his throne of onyx and bone. His eyes drooped, redly exhausted, from weeping or working or both. Before him, on a great table formed from the pelvic dish of some impossibly huge fish, lay scattered maps and plans and letters, papers and couriers’ boxes, photographs and sketches, books wedged open, upside down, splitting their spines.

Marya Morevna entered, her hunting costume half-open in the heat of the place. The dark walls of the Chernosvyat often seemed to breathe, and their breath came either brutally hot or mercilessly cold. Marya never knew which to expect. Silently, she walked around the long table and let a single golden feather drop. It drifted lazily down to rest on a requisition form. It no longer flamed, but glowed with a soft amber light.

“I would have preferred it living, volchitsa,” said Koschei, without looking up.

Marya shrugged. “It only died just now, as much of exhaustion from the hunt as the bullet.”

Koschei rose from his papers and drew her to him, bending to kiss her collarbone.

“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.