Deathless (20 page)

A cold wind began to seethe through the windowless room. It picked up speed, circling like a racing horse, whirling around and around, riffling through maps and papers, prickling skin, blowing hard and fast until it screamed by Marya Morevna and Koschei and Baba Yaga alike, snatching at their clothes, their hair, stealing their breath. Koschei raised his arms to shield his new wife. Baba Yaga rolled her eyes.

“Shit,” she said succinctly, and the wind stopped short, leaving a white silence in its place.

And someone stood in the room who had not stood there before. The man’s black hair fell all the way to the floor. He wore a grey priest’s cassock, and his chest glowed with a splatter of silver light, like a star. His eyelids were so long that they covered his body like a priest’s stole, their lashes brushing the floor. He held out his hands, stretching his long, colorless fingers toward them.

“My congratulations on your nuptials, Brother,” the man rasped. His voice sounded far away, heard through three sheets of glass. “I would have brought gifts, if I had been invited. Cattle. And cease-fires.” He smoothed his eyelids like lapels.

“But you weren’t invited, Viy,” snapped Baba Yaga. “Because you make a terrible guest. Putting out all the fires and wasting the dancing girls to skeletons when everyone else is trying to have a good ogle. Why would anyone invite you?”

“Because I attend all weddings, Night,” purred Viy. “Death stands behind every bride, every groom. Even as they say their vows, the flowers are rotting in her crown, his teeth are rotting in his head. Cancers they will not notice for thirty years grow slowly, already, in their stomachs. Her beauty browns at the edges as the ring slides up her finger. His strength saps, infinitesimally, as he kisses her. If you listen in the church, you can hear my clock tick softly, as they tock together toward the grave. I hold their hands as they stride proudly down the very short road to dotage and death. It’s all so sweet, it makes me cry. Let me kiss your bride on both cheeks, Life. Let me feel her hot blood slowly cool against my eyelids.”

“She is not for you, my brother,” said Koschei.

“Oh? Have you removed her death, too, then? I remember when you did yours—feh, what a mess!” Beneath his eyelids Marya could see the orbs of Viy’s eyes turn to her. “Of course he hasn’t. Has he, child? I can see your death blossoming like a mushroom on your chest.” Marya’s hand rose to her chest, groping for the invisible death’s-head there. Viy extended his fingers toward her, slowly, as if moving through water. A pinprick stung between her breasts—it did not hurt, exactly, but it anchored her, wholly, so that she knew Viy could move her wherever he liked. He had caught her by her heart, or her death, or both, and she wavered as he wove his ghastly fingers through the dark air. Marya had never even thought to ask for her own death to be gouged out. Not so clever, after all. She fought to hold still, to resist, but her torso writhed and shuddered. Viy dropped his hand and shook his ponderous head. The sting faded. “Don’t take it personally. Never for anyone else does our brother take out his scalpel. Only he lives forever. Everyone else, one way or another, is for me. Can only be for me. And Life, that old tyrant, he knows my land is fertile now. So many white flowers. So many dead since ’17. So many more of us than of you. Soon there will be nowhere you can walk where my folk do not flow over and around you, do not drink of your sweat, do not swallow your heat. So maybe I will still attend your wedding, eh, girl? Maybe it will be me standing by your wraith at a silver altar, putting a stone ring on the shade of your finger, suckling at the ghost of your virginity. I could fight on the field of your belly. We could split you like a province, between him and me.”

Baba Yaga scratched her braided eyebrow. “So, how did you manage to break the treaty, Viy? You aren’t allowed in Buyan and you know it. There’s doors and dogs between you and us. These little family gatherings are so awkward! Three of us in a room! That hasn’t happened since … hm, I make it since the fall of Constantinople. We went to so much trouble to keep your carcass out. It hurts our feelings when you ignore our wishes like this. Of course, oldest children are always stuffed full of their own snot.”

Viy looked at her with a strange expression—something, Marya thought, like love and care. “And what of your carcass, Night? I’ll have it too, before the century turns. We’ll all be together, one family, with one head.” The edges of Viy’s smile vanished beneath his eyelids. “The raskovnik,” he hissed with vicious satisfaction, “unlocks all locks. How considerate of our Marya to go and fetch it for us! No fool like a new bride, the old tales say. And it was not so hard a thing to send my soldiers following her stinking, beating, hollering heart across the border, then pull her off her horse so she might not see us snuffling where her vintovnik snuffled. The doors of the Country of Life lie open, and even now my comrades are streaming in like water to celebrate your wedding and leave our gifts at your doorstep. I do hope you like them. After all, Marya Morevna, we are family now.”

Viy bowed courteously, his long eyelids wrinkling. Before anyone could take another breath, he bent over at the waist until he folded up into a great white albatross and flapped slowly out of the door and down the long black stairs. Marya tore away from her new husband and after the Tsar of Death, chasing the pale, gleaming tail feathers of the bird until he burst through the huge, carved gate of the Chernosvyat and wheeled up into the grey morning sky, cawing a lonely, doleful cry.

Skorohodnaya Road stretched out before her, streaked with silver like spilled paint. Wherever the silver lay it wriggled, eating into the stone until it boiled. Infantrymen with silver-plashed chests marched through the houses, bashing in windows with the butts of their rifles, calling inside with their faraway voices, bayoneting the taverns until the walls bled. From everywhere came the sound of glass shattering.

And leaning against the rear wall of the magicians’ cafe, piled up with pale flowers and ribbons as though they were meant to be presents, rested Zemlehyed, mud trickling from a gash in his stony head, and Naganya, her iron jaw stove in, and Madame Lebedeva, a neat bullet hole blooming over her heart. She had painted her eyes red, of course, to match. Their dark stares tilted towards the dawn, but saw nothing.

PART 3

Ivanushka

You enter here, in helmet and greatcoat,

Chasing after her, without a mask.

You, Ivanushka of the old tales,

What ails you today?

So much bitterness in your every word

So much darkness in your love

And why does this stream of blood

Disturb the petal of your cheek?

—A
NNA
A
KHMATOVA

14

All These Dead

In the autumn, when the woodsmoke hung golden and thick and the snow tested the wind with white fingers, a young officer walked alone down a long, thin road, smoking a long, thin cigarette. He enjoyed his cigarette, sucking smoke with relish, taking his time. Tobacco was precious, one of his few privileges as an officer. It was like smoking gold. Little shivers of delight ran down his spine as the cold sun hit his smoke, splitting into paradisiacal rays. His boots crunched on the frosted dirt of the road, and that too, he enjoyed: the crisp, bright sound of his own steps through the broad-leafed forest, the warmth of his woolen coat and fur cap, the meeting of cigarette and frozen dirt and yellow leaves and Ivan Nikolayevich, for whom the morning proceeded exceedingly well.

Ivan had already tasted not only tobacco but butter that day. The memory of his knife scraping over fried bread and leaving a trail of glistening salted cream still thrilled him. He had begun to think butter a prize from some mythical tale, like a firebird’s feather. But even now his blood beat faster recalling the slip of grease on his bread. His bones felt strong, his legs big enough to take three rivers in one stride. Just last Saturday, during his mandatory volunteer labor, he had picked more apples than any of the city boys, those brainy students with glasses and sloppy hair. The pleasant hum of his muscles and the taste of his one stolen apple, hard and sweet and sour, still hung around him like a bright, beery haze. What to do with this surplus of good feeling and big legs? Ivan Nikolayevich had taken up the jewel of his lunch break and gone for a walk in the larch forest beyond the fences of his camp.

And so Ivan strode expansively through the first falling leaves, taking tiny gulps of his cigarette to make it last. But the sweetness of cigarettes is, in part, that they spend themselves so fast. The young officer, with regret, but a chest full of richness, stomped out the last tiny nub of it into the frost.

A few feet away, under a bright scaffolding of golden leaves, Ivan Nikolayevich saw a man’s hand. The fingers had gone grey and bluish. The hand still clutched a scrap of last night’s snow. Ivan did not move, but followed the hand with his eyes, up to the wrist, the forearm, the shoulder, and finally the face of the dead man, lying in the forest, his eyes shallow and staring, his mouth open as though he had forgotten what he meant to say. He was not Russian—Ivan could be certain of that. The man wore a spangled, scarlet scarf around his head, and a row of steel earrings in his left ear, which had been half sawed off. His clothes glittered with ornament; his boots shone, a strange buttery green leather. Further, he still clung to his rifle, even in death, and Ivan Nikolayevich knew well that Russian dead never kept their rifles long. Ivan knew he ought to return to his camp at once and report the dead foreigner in the woods. Instead he took a few steps in his threadbare boots and prodded the corpse with his toe.

Maybe those boots will fit me,
thought Ivan Nikolayevich. He could already feel their softness on his sore feet. Russian dead do not keep their boots long, either.
I’ve a dog’s luck today! Butter, a good smoke, and new boots!
But beyond the dead man lay another upturned hand, a woman’s, spattered with blood. Ivan shivered and shoved his hands deep in his pockets. Best to leave them. He could never explain the color to his comrades, anyway. But still, he inched forward, peering around a slim birch to see the face of the dead girl, her cheek well pecked by birds, one eye gone. She wore a wild scarf, too, yellow as the leaves, and on her forehead twisted two small horns, like a baby goat’s. Ivan hissed through his teeth and made the sign of the cross. It was a bad habit, crossing yourself, but like biting fingernails, hard to break.

As if they were bread crumbs, he followed the dead deeper into the wood. Sometimes a cluster of them lay fallen in a circle, back to back, having perished defending themselves. Sometimes they had died alone. Sometimes they had horns, like the woman in the yellow scarf. Sometimes they had tails. Sometimes they looked not very different from Ivan himself. Here and there the frozen ground glittered: splashes of something awful, like silver paint. There were so many of them. Ivan began to feel sick, and he regretted his precious butter. But he did not stop. How could there have been such a battle so near to his camp without one of the sentries raising the alarm for rifle fire? The wind kicked at the flaps of his grey coat. He longed for another cigarette to comfort himself.

Finally, the wood opened out onto a deep, stony valley clouded with brown leaves. Ivan Nikolayevich’s horror escaped his lips—he cried out, and fell to his knees. Thousands of dead littered the earth, their hands upturned, their eyes blind and flat, their beautiful clothes flapping in the breeze. A shrike cawed bitterly overhead, swooping in to yank on an eyelid, shaking his little black head to rip it free. Great gouts of the silver paint soaked the ground. Many of the fighters’ chests were sprayed with it. It had no smell. None of the dead smelled. Up on the next ridge of the valley a black tent stood, long, thin flags in red and white and gold snapping stiffly under low clouds.

Ivan shouted into the wind, “If any man remains alive here, let him answer! Who slew this great army?”

One soldier, near to him, coughed, blowing bubbles of blood from the corners of his mouth. Ivan Nikolayevich rushed to him, gave him water from his own flask. But the water just ran over his face, wetting it darkly, like silk. The soldier drew a ragged breath, and threads popped free in the corners of his lips. Ivan recoiled.

“All these dead belong to Marya Morevna, the queen from beyond the sea.”

And then the soldier died, with that name on his threadbare lips.

Ivan stumbled up toward the black tent, tripping over bodies, clutching his hat to his head. He knuckled tears from his eyes, moving like a mountain climber over their scarves, their spangles, their perfect boots.
Don’t look down. Don’t look down.

No guards flanked the tent. Ivan Nikolayevich started as a silver-white thing moved in the corner of his eye. When he turned toward it, he saw only more dead, only more leaves. The tent shuddered.

“Screeeach,” croaked something neither the tent nor a soldier. Ivan whirled. It lumbered over the broken flotsam, teetering here and there over a crooked elbow, a twisted leg. Ivan could not tell if it was a man or a woman—its dark, hairy shoulders hunched up, hiding its head, and it creaked when it moved, like a weather vane. Ivan desperately longed to run, to move his strong legs, to take three rivers in a stride. Instead, he waited, his heart half-faint, until the thing stepped over a bony corpse and pulled up its head from deep in its chest.