Deathless (25 page)

“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 be 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!
”

The girl did not move.

“Yelena, Yelena, you’re the only ones like me in all the world. What will happen to me? What has happened to you? To all of you? Yelena, every spring I march out with all these soldiers, and when I touch their shoulders, I think of you, all of you. I can’t help it. And it strikes such awful fear in me, because I seem to see terror and uncertainty in their woven eyes, and they are not meant to be alive. But they cry out when they are shot, as if they were alive, and I shiver. Speak to me, Yelena. Or Vasilisa—is it Vasilisa? I feel my heart draining from me, every day, in every cold tent, in every inch of half-dead earth where blood spills like thread. I am so afraid, Vasilisa. I fear the war is going badly.”

But the weaver did not look up, and all around them the machines whirred on, without a care for either of them. Marya wiped her tears and stood up. Her knee popped and creaked, having been bashed in during the first battle of Skorohodnaya Road, one they had won, but barely, oh, just barely.

The weaver, Yelena or Vasilisa, turned her head slowly, without moving the rest of her body. She stared blindly at Marya’s stomach, at the height where her face had been a moment before.

“The war is always going badly,” the girl said, and picked up her shuttle once more.

Marya Morevna pulled at the girl’s arm. She hauled as hard as she could, but it was like pulling stone. She went from girl to girl, pleading, crying, her face hot and shamed, forgetting, for once, all about herself, knowing only that one had spoken, and so they must all be alive. But no Yelena budged, and no Vasilisa spoke again, and none of them would go with her, even when she fell into a heap in the center of the whirring factory’s floor, hopeless and defeated.

*   *   *

“Is he a vampire?” asked Ivan Nikolayevich, sitting uncomfortably in the red sea of her bed, unconcernedly naked, ignoring the black nightshirt Koschei had provided.

“What an odd thing to say,” said Marya, standing by her mirror. She watched herself as she brushed out her long, ruined hair with long strokes of a boar’s bristle brush—one which called no strange old woman, which brought no fate to bear. The boar’s hair passed through Marya Morevna’s hair, glistening. She liked her body, liked looking at it, even—especially—scored with the tiger stripes of welts across her naked heavy breasts, her belly. She did not have a girl’s body anymore; her hips were a lion’s hips, her chest strong and muscled, her legs trained to leap and run and kneel to fire. Scars marked her skin like constellations, leading all the way up to the first, Zmey Gorinich’s mark, which still stood on her cheek like a streak of black paint.

“He licked the blood on your hand,” Ivan said. “And he is old, and pale, and his teeth are like tusks. I know he looks young, but he’s not, really. Sitting next to him is like sitting next to some impossibly ancient statue in a museum. So I think it’s a logical question, really.”

“He is the Tsar of Life, and blood is life. So is soup and vodka and baths and fucking. But I don’t think he’s a vampire. At least, not the kind you bury upside down at crossroads.”

Ivan frowned and ran a broad brown hand through his hair. “You keep calling him that. The Tsar of Life.”

“That’s what he is.”
And am I the Tsaritsa of Life, then?
half her heart asked. The other half answered,
Not even for a moment were you ever queen
.

“But it’s a certain kind of life, isn’t it?” Ivan leaned forward, his sunburned head catching the candlelight. He looked like a wonderful dog, huge and hearty, who had found a bone. “It’s … mushroom-life. The pale, rooty kind that grows in blackness. I’ll bet in all your years here he has never given you a fresh apple to eat. Everything he loves is preserved, salted …
pickled
. I suppose it’s alive, but it’s kept alive, forever, in a glass bell. And he is, too. A pickled husband, that’s what you have.”

Marya turned from the mirror, scowling. “And you are fresh, is that it? Right off the tree? But then you will brown, and turn mealy, and there will be worms in you, someday. Koschei will never wilt.”

Ivan shrugged bashfully. “I would not presume.”

“Of course you will. You presume already.”

“You are a human woman,” he said quietly. “You do not belong here, with all this blood, all this pickling. And their brine is seeping into you, bit by bit. You can even disappear like they can. And who knows what else!”

“Well.” Marya laughed gently. “I can’t really, not like they can. I’m not very good at it. I can only do it in certain places, where the boundaries are quite thin. We had to walk to the place where I spun around and carried you off, remember? I do not know so many of those places. Territory changes too fast to keep the maps up-to-date. But you could probably do it, too, in the thin places. If you practiced. It isn’t hard.”

“I don’t
want
to do it.” Ivan Nikolayevich began to roll a cigarette. Without her asking, a bronze tray had quietly appeared, set neatly with papers and crisp, curling tobacco. Ivan thought the stuff hers, but Marya knew better—Koschei had inserted himself here, between them, even when he was gone.

“Why not?” She shrugged. “It’s fun. It feels good.”

“Not to me.
You
feel good, and sunlight on wheat, and fresh butter and eggs and cigarettes like these, which I roll myself, just as I like them. Magic feels like stripping off my skin and putting it on again, backwards.”

Marya put down her brush and crawled onto the bed, reveling in the feeling of stalking him, catlike, hungry. Of knowing more than he did. It was how Koschei felt, she guessed. All the time.