Deathless

by Catherynne M. Valente

From the year nineteen forty I look out on everything as if from a high tower As if bidding farewell To that from which I long ago parted. As if crossing myself And descending beneath dark arches. —ANNA AKHMATOVA

Yet three skinny, molting creatures clapped a withered pear branch in their claws, peering down with eyes like rosary beads: a gold-speckled plover, a sharp-billed shrike, and a bony, black-faced rook clutched the greenbark trunk.

Major-General Marya Morevna sat impassively and watched the child weep. The staff sergeant tapped her pen impatiently. “Go,” Morevna whispered. “Run. Don’t look behind you.” The boy looked at her dumbly. “Run, boy,” the major-general whispered.

The boy ran. Flecks of dead earth flew up behind him. The wind caught them, and carried them away towards the sea.

And you will arrive under a soldier’s black mantle With your fearful greenish candle And will not show your face to me. But the riddle cannot torment me for long: Whose hand is here, under that white glove Who sent this wanderer, who comes in darkness? —ANNA AKHMATOVA

In a city by the sea which was once called St. Petersburg, then Petrograd, then Leningrad, then, much later, St. Petersburg again, there stood a long, thin house on a long, thin street. By a long, thin window, a child in a pale blue dress and pale green slippers waited for a bird to marry her. This would be cause for most girls to be very gently closed up in their rooms until they ceased to think such alarming things, but Marya Morevna had seen all three of her sisters’ husbands from her window before they knocked at the great cherrywood door, and thus she was as certain of her own fate as she was certain of the color of the moon.

It could be said, and was, that Marya Morevna had twelve mothers and twelve fathers, and so did all the children of that long, thin house. But all of Marya’s mothers laughed at her aimless manner. All her fathers looked troubled at her wild, loose hair. All their children stole her biscuits from the communal table. They did not like her, and she did not like them.

And if they thought her aimless, if they thought her a bit mad, let them. It meant they left her alone. Marya was not aimless, anyway. She was thinking.

Her sisters had been rescued from the city as beautiful girls are often rescued from unpleasant things, but they did not know what their husbands really were. They were missing vital information. Marya saw right away that this made a tilted kind of marriage, and she wanted no part of that. I will never be without information, she determined. I will do better than my sisters. If a bird or any other beast comes out of that uncanny republic where husbands are grown, I will see him with his skin off before I agree to fall in love.

If the world is divided into seeing and not seeing, Marya thought, I shall always choose to see.

Only once did Marya Morevna try to share her secret. If it was wrong to hoard a house, surely it was wrong to hoard knowledge. She was younger then, only thirteen, past the plovers and the shrikes. It was at thirteen years old that Marya Morevna learned how to keep a secret, and that secrets are jealous things, permitting no fraternization.

When she read the great poet, she would say softly to herself, Yes, that is true because I saw it with my own eyes. Or, No, it’s not like that, when magic comes. She measured Pushkin against the birds, against herself, and believed the poor dead man to be on her side, the two of them steadfast, shoulder to shoulder.

There, weeping, a tsarevna lies locked in a cell. And Master Grey Wolf serves her very well. There, in her mortar, sweeping beneath the skies, the demon Baba Yaga flies. There Tsar Koschei, he wastes away, poring over his pale gold.

Magic does that. It wastes you away. Once it grips you by the ear, the real world gets quieter and quieter, until you can hardly hear it at all.

One by one they spat on her as they went to their suppers. Some called her bourgeois, a traitor; some called her worse, a kulak, a whore—though she could not be all those things at once. It didn’t matter. She was a person, but she was not one of the People. Not to her old friends, not anymore.

After that, Marya Morevna understood that she belonged to her secret and it belonged to her. They had struck a bloody bargain between them. Keep me and obey me, the secret said to her, for I am your husband and I can destroy you.

On the twelfth night, when Marya Morevna was four steps across the floor, poised halfway between cobalt and green with her leg extended like a parade soldier, she heard a little breath beneath her own, so quiet she had to stretch her ears around it, a tiny sound, a faucet hissing in a thunderstorm. She looked down, her black hair spilling over her shoulder like a curious shadow. Thus Marya Morevna first saw the domovoi, and the face of the world changed again.

“I would have been happy to stay in Kiev,” huffed a shrunken old domovoi, his skin almost blue with age, “but blasted Svetlana Tikhonovna knew the old ritual. She went out into her pumpkin rows in her best black lace-up boots with the sweet little heels, laid out a big round of cheese, and hollered, ‘Grandfather Domovoi! Don’t stay in this place, but come with our family!’ The old bitch.”

The Causations of the Great War were several. First, the avid student must be aware that when the world was young it knew only seven things: water, life and death, salt, night, birds, and the length of an hour. Each of these things had Tsars or Tsaritsas, and chief among these were the Tsar of Death and the Tsar of Life.

And only after eons did it master the techniques of the sun, earth, sugar, the length of a year, and men. The Tsars or Tsaritsas retreated into mountains and snow. They stayed far from each other out of family respect, but had no interest in these new things, which were surely passing fashions. But the Tsar of Death and the Tsar of Life greatly feared one another, for Death is surrounded by souls, and is never lonely, and the Tsar of Life had hidden his death away in a place deeper than secrets, and more secret than depth. The Tsaritsa of Salt could not reconcile them, though they were brothers, and the Tsaritsa of Water could not find an ocean wide enough to place between them. After a space of time longer than it takes the stars to draw breath together, the Tsar of Death was so well loved by his court of souls that he became puffed up and proud. He bedecked himself in onyx, agate, and hematite, and gave bayonets of ice, and cannons of bone, and horses of drifting ash with eyes and nostrils of red sparks to each of the souls that had perished in the long, tawdry history of the world. Together this great army, with shrouds flying like banners and trumpets of twelve swords lashed together marched out across the deep snow and into the lonely kingdom of the Tsar of Life.

“Who are you?” she whispered. “Say my name, daughter. You know who I am.” “Widow Likho.” “What is my name, Marya Morevna?” the crone roared, her black voice bending the windows and rattling the books on the shelf. Marya quailed, shrinking away into the upholstery. “Widow Likho! Comrade Likho! Comrade … oh … oh. Likho. Bad luck.”

“But never you fear me, Marya Morevna!” Her voice turned crooning, sibilant, her breath sawing back and forth. She took Marya’s face in her impossibly long hands. “I cannot touch you. You are not for me. Papers have been drawn up in your name, silks and candies allocated. Everyone knows to make way. But you called; I had to come. I am here to educate you, to make you ready. There is no better teacher of rough necessity than bad luck, and you will have great use of me, I promise. Keep your bread. Keep your tears. Neither will help you, and you will work hard to outgrow need of them. Go home. Pat your mother’s hand and kiss your father’s cheek. Drink out of your broken teacup.” Likho grinned. “Don’t forget to brush your lovely black hair. And come to me when the sun is low. Come to me and be my pupil, my pet, my daughter.”

Marya Morevna shook her head: No, not like this, when I have not seen you without your skin on, when I know nothing, when I am not safe. Not you, whose name all my nightmares know.

If she had spent her hours knitting a lover instead of coats for Anna’s son, the man who knelt before her would have sprung from her needles, even down to the ghostly flecks of silver in his hair.

“Will you even say good-bye to your mothers?” Marya shook her head. What would she say? How could she explain? She couldn’t even explain to herself. Mother, I have been waiting for something to happen to me my whole life, and now that it has I am going, even though it is a tilted kind of thing, and I meant to be so much better at it than my sisters. “What a dreadful girl I have raised! Still, if you don’t ask their permission, they can’t say no. That’s our sort of logic.”

Men, they feel nothing like what we must endure. You have to make room in yourself for him, and that is the same in a house as in a body. See that you keep some rooms for yourself, locked up tight.

But you like him already, I can tell. Even though we showed our teeth and were very clear about his being wicked. That’s not your fault. He makes himself pretty, so that girls will like him. But if you must insist on being clever, then be clever. Be brave. Sleep with fists closed and shoot straight.” Comrade Zvonok shrugged and sighed with a little whistling sound. “But I am selfish! I must learn to give the best of my house away.”

“Who is to rule,” Zvonok hissed, and disappeared. Marya blinked. Tears dropped from her eyes like tiny, hard beads. Her legs, all against her head, longed to straighten and take her to the door, to Comrade Bessmertny, still kneeling there in the cold like a knight. She ruled nothing, Marya knew. Nothing and no one.

She did not like to be ordered. She wanted to say a hundred, a thousand things. She wanted to leap upon him and demand he explain it all: Likho, the domoviye, the birds, her whole life. I have to know, I have to, or else you will just rule me until the end of everything because you know and I do not.

“As you swallow the cow’s tongue, think for a moment about how strange and holy that is, to devour the tongue of another. To steal from it all its power to speak, to low at the moon, to call to its calf. To be worthy of such food you must guard your own words carefully, speaking only the wise and clever ones, lest your tongue end up likewise, on the plate of a rich man.

Therefore, it is better to be strong and cruel than to be fair. At least, one eats better that way. And morality is more dependent on the state of one’s stomach than of one’s nation.”

What kind of bird are you really, under your skin? Are you truly the domoviye’s Papa? Likho’s brother? I am not fooled by you pretending Bessmertny is your surname! Likho taught me better than to think names are only names and mean nothing! Koschei the Deathless, that’s what it means, and that’s you, it must be you. But what does that mean for me now? What will you do with me?

Perhaps all a Tsaritsa is is a beautiful cold girl in the snow, looking down at someone wretched, and not yielding.

“I keep it in a glass chest,” he gasped finally, pushing her roughly back over the stacks of predicted troop movements, his fists caught up in the infinite mass of her hair. “Guarded by four dogs: a wolf like you, a starved racing hound, a haughty lap pup, and a fat sheepdog. All their names begin with the same letter, and only I know the letter.” He shut his eyes against her cheek as she arched toward him like a drawn bow. “And only someone who knows their names can reach the chest where I keep my death.”

“Forests have secrets,” he said gently. “It’s practically what they’re for. To hide things. To separate one world from another.

Zemlehyed shrugged. “It’s in my nature. I hoard. It’s in their nature, too, which is why Lebedeva has more night creams than nights, and Nasha collects tin cans. Zmey Gorinich, he is like this as well. But I think it is also in your nature.” Marya blinked. “I don’t think so. What have I collected?” Zemlehyed smiled in a lopsided way, as though he did not quite know how to use his face. “Us.”

“I am a conduit. Moscow, she sends me meat and bones, and I send her rich, soft cotton, rich, soft petroleum. Tribute. It’s an old, honorable system.”

“Masha, listen to me. Cosmetics are an extension of the will. Why do you think all men paint themselves when they go to fight? When I paint my eyes to match my soup, it is not because I have nothing better to do than worry over trifles. It says, I belong here, and you will not deny me. When I streak my lips red as foxgloves, I say, Come here, male. I am your mate, and you will not deny me. When I pinch my cheeks and dust them with mother-of-pearl, I say, Death, keep off, I am your enemy, and you will not deny me. I say these things, and the world listens, Masha. Because my magic is as strong as an arm. I am never denied.”

Blue is for cruel bargains; green is for daring what you oughtn’t; violet is for brute force. I will say to you: Coral coaxes; pink insists; red compels. I will say to you: You are dear to me as attar of roses. Please do not get eaten.”

“As for why I let you ride me, ah, what a terrible science, riding and being ridden! Which is the servant: the one who bears his mistress, or the one who combs and brushes her mount? It is simple, Marya Morevna. You served me when first we met. You polished my skin and gave me new shoes. You slept against my flank. Service buys service. In my four hearts, service is the only possible expression of love. I serve Koschei. But if you had not run your hand along my fetlock, I would never have served you.” Volchya-Yagoda turned his gaunt head to nip at her. It hurt, but she took it as it was meant, gently, with affection.

“Is it not so in your world?” “I suppose. But such things upset people. We hold demonstrations and civil wars when inequities are discovered.” The stallion snorted, and his breath curled in the cold. “Marya Morevna, we are better at this than you are. We can hold two terrible ideas at once in our hearts. Never have your folk delighted us more, been more like family. For a devil, hypocrisy is a parlor game, like charades. Such fun, and when the evening is done we shall be holding our bellies to keep from dying of laughter.”

“I am Marya Morevna, daughter of twelve mothers, and I will not be denied,” she whispered to the girl in the mirror.

The northern boundary of Buyan flows over a hilly, snowbound country. The earth there has never yet seen the sun. All year the ice crowds close around the three or four grass seeds that valiantly pray for the coming of light. Once, the leshiyi built a wall through the winter, so that the northern sea would know it was forbidden here. But like all stones touched by leshiyi, the wall sighed and dreamed and wished for more than it had, and all the while, silently grew. Now, only an archaeologist might be able to guess that the purple-black cliff with a dozen goats gnawing at its roof was once a wall, could see the old, vague shapes of bricks in the foot of the cliff. Could pick out the crack of a cavern, where the wall’s watchtower was once kept, from which alarms once rang down the valleys, rung by some mossy, granite-heavy soul.

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.

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.”

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.”

Marya lifted her hand and laid it on her husband’s cheek. With a blinking quickness, she drove her nails deep into his face. “Don’t you dare speak to me like that. I have worn nothing but blood and death for years. I have fought all your battles for you, just as you asked me. I have learned all the tricks you said I must learn. I have learned not to cry when I strangle a man. I have learned to lay my finger aside my nose and disappear. I have learned to watch everything die. I am not a little girl anymore, dazzled by your magic. It is my magic, now, too. And if I have watched all my soldiers die in front of me, if I have only been saved by my rifle and my own hands, if I have drunk more blood than water for weeks, then I take the human boy who stumbled into my tent and hold him between my legs until I stop screaming, you will not punish me for it. Are we not chyerti? Are we not devils? I will not even hear your punishment, old man.”

“Would it not be better for your war-mistress to be as deathless as you? I am not safe because of a treaty. Viy’s fear of you is no shield, not really. I am naked and far from you most of the year. Open my bones and scoop out my death. Bury it at the center of the earth. I deserve so much. You know what I deserve.” “You have asked me this before. I cannot.” “You took my will.” “So all seductions go. One will presented to another, wrapped in a bow. The question is always who is to take and who is to give. I took first, that’s all. You will take last. I am better at such games than you, but students wax in their talents, always, always. Your death you cannot give me by opening your pretty mouth and tasting roe. And I will not take it.”

“It’s not so bad, my darling. Being dead. It’s like being alive, only colder. Things taste less. They feel less. You forget, little by little, who you were. There isn’t much love, but there is a lot of vodka, and reminiscing. It’s rather like a university reunion, but the cakes and tarts are made of dust. And there is always a war on. But there was always a war on before, too, wasn’t there? And the sight of warm things just makes you furious, angrier than I ever thought I could be. I have no warm things of my own, you see. I want them so. And I cannot remember things so well. As though I am getting old—but I cannot ever get any older. Still, I am glad you spoke to me before I forgot you.”

“I thought if I didn’t look at you, any of you, you would go away, and I wouldn’t have to remember.” “Someday, we will go away. Or maybe we’ll forget who you are but still cling to you because of habit, and all we will know is that we have always clung to this girl with black hair, whoever she is.”