Deathless (21 page)

It had a woman’s face, so perfectly young and beautiful that Ivan Nikolayevich hurt with the force of her gaze, his skin prickling to life. Her exquisite eyebrows arched over fierce blue-violet eyes, and her lips parted like a bride waiting to be kissed. But her dark hair snarled and matted like a bear’s, and she wore no clothes but bedraggled feathers, more like fur than down, hanging in clumps all the way from her huge, square, skeletal shoulders to her lizard-yellow, three-toed feet—a bird’s talons, clawing at the frozen ground.

“I’ve a dog’s luck today,” she barked, spittle flying. “Butter, a good smoke, and new boots!” The bird-woman chuckled as though she had made a quality joke. When her lovely mouth opened, Ivan could see that she had only three teeth, sunk in rickety white gums. She arched her back; her shoulders opened up into half-denuded wings. She flapped them twice, three times before settling, folding them down against her back. Ivan crossed himself again.

“Please, boy. What is that? You’re supposed to be through with God. Threw up your hands and called Him a lot of dirty names, what? Threw bricks through His windows! Personally, I have nothing against opiates or masses, but you had Him there. It’s a fair charge.” The bird-woman opened her mouth wide and
screeeached
again.

“You’re a devil!” cried Ivan Nikolayevich.

“Well spotted.”

Ivan tried to breathe more slowly. The cold sliced up his mouth. “God doesn’t exist only so long as devils also don’t exist,” he whispered. “Otherwise, the whole game is up.”

She lifted one leg, then put it down and lifted the other, rocking back and forth.

“Then up it goes, Ivan Nikolayevich.”

“How do you know my name?”

“Do you know, every time I have spoken to a human, I have been asked that? It’s almost a comfort. Almost endearing, how you look at me all big-eyed like that. I am the Gamayun, boy. I know everyone’s names. Of course, even if I didn’t, you’re always named Ivan Nikolayevich. It’s cheating, I admit. Not too much better than pulling an egg out of your ear.”

Ivan did not believe in God. Not really, the way he believed in breakfast, in butter, in cigarettes. Unlucky enough to have been born before the Revolution, he had been baptized and was prone to unfortunate lapses such as crossing himself. But Ivan knew that religious dogma served only to oppress the workers. He was proud of his clean mind, his modern thinking, which was free of all those holy, hollow promises.

Ivan Nikolayevich did not believe in God, but he did believe in the Gamayun. His mother had stopped reading the Bible to him as a good mother should, but she had never stopped telling stories around the stove, when winter hunkered down in the dark. Ivan could not remember her saying,
Our Father who art in Heaven
. But he recalled with a piercing clarity her face lit by the pitch-pine firelight as she whispered,
The Gamayun eats from the bowl of the past and the present and the future, the bowl in which my Ivanushka is a baby, and a strong boy, and an old man with grandchildren. Here she comes, looking like a bird, but she is not a bird—creak, creak, creak!

“You know me, eh?” The Gamayun grinned. “Good. I know people in high places, see. I have assurances from the government. If Christ returned on a golden cloud, they’d arrest him on the spot, but me they leave alone. Revolutions can only go so far.”

Ivan’s palms stuck together in his fists, clammy, cold. How could he put this in his daily report? “Who is in that tent, Gamayun?”

“Go in and find out. You will eventually anyway. It can’t unhappen before it happens. And then it will all start, like an engine, going and going ’til there’s nothing left to burn.”

“I don’t understand,” he whispered.

The Gamayun waddled toward him, her head bobbing over her massive wing-shoulders. She crouched on the belly of a dead soldier, her weight cracking ribs, her claws gripping clumps of his wine-colored shirt. “Sit down, Ivan Nikolayevich. I am going to tell you everything that will ever happen to you. Come on, then, find your knees—there you are, that’s how they bend.” The Gamayun’s beautiful face peered out of the wreckage of her bird’s body. Her neck stretched out long and sinuously, like a swan’s, but thick, ropy with sinew.

Ivan sat down in the grass, carefully avoiding offense to some poor dead creature.

“Why would you do such a terrible thing?” Ivan asked.

“Because I have to make sure things happen the way they happen.”

“But they must, mustn’t they?”

The Gamayun laid her head to one side. Her eyes shone. “Oh, Ivanushka, not by themselves, they don’t. Think of when your mother told you stories by the stove. You had heard those stories a hundred times. Jack always climbed the beanstalk. Dobrynya Nikitich always went to the Saracen Mountains. Finist the Falcon always married the merchant’s daughter. You knew how they ended. But you still wanted to hear your mother tell them, with her gentle voice and her fearful imitation of a growling wolf. If she told them differently, they would not happen the way they have already happened. But still, she must
tell
them for the story to continue. For it to happen the way it always happens. It is like that with me. I know all the stories. The boyars always shave their beards. The Church always splits. Ukraine always withers in a poison wind. But I still want to hear the world tell them the way only it can tell them. I want to quiver when the world imitates a wolf. It still has to
happen
for it to happen. You have already gone into that tent. You have already made off with her. You have already lost her. You could tell your tale differently this time, I suppose. But you won’t. Your name will always be Ivan Nikolayevich. You will always go into that tent. You will see her scar, below her eye, and wonder where she got it. You will always be amazed at how one woman can have so much black hair. You will always fall in love, and it will always be like having your throat cut, just that fast. You will always run away with her. You will always lose her. You will always be a fool. You will always be dead, in a city of ice, snow falling into your ear. You have already done all of this and will do it again. I am only here to make sure it happens.”

“You frighten me.” And indeed, he was shaking, all over, every cell vibrating with the presence of the Gamayun, with the pressure of her words, so heavy, like a storm coming that he could feel in his knees, in his chest.

“Yes,” she said simply.

“I don’t understand. I want to understand.”

“You will. Before the end. You will. You always do.”

“Then why do things happen the way they happen? If I understand it I can change it. Is it your fault? Do you stop me from changing it?” The Gamayun had to tell the truth. Ivan knew that; he remembered it from every tale. And so he could not find any part of himself with the capability to disbelieve her.

“They happen because Life consumes everything and Death never sleeps, and between them the world moves. Winter becomes spring. And every once in a while, they act out a strange, sad little pantomime, just to see if anyone has won yet. If the world still moves as it used to.” The Gamayun ruffled her ragged feathers and glanced up at Ivan under her eyelashes. “Like a passion play. Like a sacrifice. It is certainly not my fault.”

Ivan looked towards the black tent. “I could run home, back to my camp. I could resume my watch and say nothing, ever, of this.”

The Gamayun arched one perfect eyebrow. “Go, then, Ivanushka. Run. Believe me, she isn’t worth it.”

Clouds riffled through Ivan Nikolayevich’s hair. He frowned and thought of how much he had loved the cigarette of this morning. Of his dog’s luck. If he ran, he would still die, sometime. It was 1939. People died all the time. He would still die, but he would die not knowing who was in the black tent. He would wonder about it constantly, like a cut on the inside of his mouth he could never stop worrying with his tongue. Whenever he died, wherever he died, it would be the last thing he thought of: the flapping of the black silk, and how it sounded like whispering.

Ivan had not moved.

“Dobrynya Nikitich always goes to the Saracen Mountains,” said the Gamayun softly. Then she tucked her head under her shoulders and disappeared between two blinks.

15

Dominion

Marya Morevna bent over her desk, her hair bound up in a braid around her head, her marshal’s uniform mud-stiff.

The war is going badly.

The war is always going badly.

She passed a hand over her eyes. A year and more now, that she had needed glasses.
Look,
those glasses said from her desk.
Look how much you are not like the others.
You
grow older and your eyes wear out. In case you could ever mistake yourself for belonging.
Marya supposed this was why no one asked after stolen fairy tale girls. What embarrassments they turn out to be. They grow tempers; they join the army; they need glasses. Who wants them?

Marya tapped her silver telegraph. Telephones did not agree with her countrymen. She did not know why and neither did they, but their noses bled when they tried to speak into the receivers. Their ears, too, but not so much. Tap-tap-tick-tap.
It is over. No one is left. I am coming home.

She felt a man in her tent suddenly, like a bolt sliding into place. The warmth of him beat against her back, golden, innocent. He smelled like cigarettes and hot bread and male skin. She had gotten good at smelling as everything wore on; she smelled as a wolf smells, now. Marya Morevna did not turn to look at him, but she knew him, how big he seemed in the tent, big as the whole sun.
Not now, oh, not now.
She almost threw up—and that was how she knew how far she had gone. Once, magic made her feel hot and sick all at once. Now humans did it, twisting her stomach until she longed to rip it out and have done with her whole body.

“I assume,” she said, her throat thick, “your name is Ivan Nikolayevich.” She wanted to accuse him, to have him arrested and brought up on charges of being Ivan, to see him hung for it. How often had Koschei and Yaga told her this day would come, warned of it like a cholera outbreak in the next village, extolled its inevitability. How she had always laughed.

“Yes.” And she heard his voice for the first time, soft and deep as summer mud. She heard as a wolf hears.

“And naturally, you are the youngest of three sons.”

“I … I am.”

“And you are the honest one? Your older brothers, they are wicked and false, and your poor father could never tell the difference?” Marya tasted the bitterness in her voice, like a tannic tea brewed from everything unfair, puckering her mouth.

“My brothers died. In Ukraine, in the famine. I could not say if they would have grown up to be wicked or false.”

Marya paused, her hand floating over a map of the gnarled, twisting borderland between Buyan and the Siberian city of Irkutsk.

“I could call in my men. I could have you killed. For no reason but that your name is Ivan and I wish it. I should kill you myself. A bullet is not so bad.”

His voice rolled over her again, rich and alive, Russian and familiar. “Please don’t.”

“She said you’d come and I swore to eat your heart. You can’t break oaths to the dead.”

“Who said?” asked Ivan Nikolayevich.

“An old friend. It doesn’t matter.”

“Who are those soldiers there? For what did they die?”

“For the war. For me. I don’t know.”

“What war? There is a treaty. We are safe from Germany.”

Marya laughed harshly. She rubbed her aching eyes again. What a word to hear, now, in this place. “I had forgotten there was such a thing as Germany. We fight for Koschei, against Viy. For Life, against Death. Some of those soldiers are ours. And once they die, they go over to Viy, conscripted. We bleed souls to him. The ones with silver on their chests, they are Viy’s dead, his ghosts, whom we have killed. But we don’t know where they go. They do not come over to
our
side. They leave corpses, like the living. But they’re just gone. Maybe there’s another army, invisible, even more invisible than ghosts, fighting over things we don’t know and can’t see, and they fill the ranks there. But we don’t know. And what can you do? Died means died. Even for them.”

“How is it possible to kill a ghost? And will you please look at me?” Marya could hear it in his voice:
Crazy girl. You’re a crazy girl.
Her ears burned.

“Same way you kill anything else. A bullet works fine. Bayonets, too. A good strangling never goes wrong. And no. I will not look at you. I will never look at you.”
And I’m not crazy. How dare you think such a thing, how dare you come here, how dare you live?

“You are Marya Morevna,” Ivan said. “The queen from beyond the sea.”

“Do they still call me that? It’s so strange. I’m too young to remember when there was a sea here.”

“Are you a demon? Do you have horns? Wings?”

Marya thought for a long while.
Who do you belong to, little girl? Why are you out here in the deep, dark wood?

“I am Koschei’s wife,” she answered finally. “And I am a woman. I do not have horns.”