Deathless

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.

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.”

She could feel Ivan breathing, as though the tent expanded and contracted to fill him and drain him and fill him again. “I think I have intruded,” he said softly. “I only wanted to have a cigarette and a walk. I do not understand what is happening here. I understand my camp, and my comrades, and that we will each have broth and a turnip tonight. I am looking forward to it. I like turnips. They taste a little buttery, and they are so hot when they first come out of the pot. I can be satisfied with turnips all my days, I think. I do not need to know about the kind of girl who would marry Koschei the Deathless.”

Marya’s knees ached. Have I ever been so tired? Tired as an old saddle. She realized that she still worked the telegraph beneath her cold fingers. Tap-tap-tick-tap. Automatic, like a charlatan medium channeling the little lost tsarevich.

“Do you know we tell stories about you?” she said, staring at the telegraph knob under her hand. “You are a monster, an ogre. We laugh about you. Be good to your girl, Koschei, or an Ivan will come and whisk her away! That’s what they like best, Ivans. To seduce Koschei’s wives. It is their number one hobby. Somehow, I forgot that there really are boys named Ivan.”

“I am not seducing you!”

“You are, though,” said Marya, and she heard her own voice fill up with familiarity, with longing. She almost turned. She almost called him Vanya, Ivanushka, as though they were already lovers. Her hip already moved toward him a little, as though her whole self meant to fix him with a gentle expression and forgive him, in the beginning, so that she would not have to, later. She could not explain it, the pull of him, like Viy pulling at her breasts with his pinprick sting. The dead Tsar had caught her by the death and spun her around. Ivan, oh, just his voice, had caught her by the life. “You are. Just by lifting the flap of my tent, you are. Just by being warm and alive and near me. After this long day, and all of Viy’s cavalry sweeping over my battalion like water. I lost two colonels today. Two colonels and a major and so many horses. So many girls. And tomorrow I will wake up and pin up the front of my uniform and look them all in the eye, my comrades, the very same, only they’ll have silver stars shining on their chests and they’ll want to cut out my liver. And into all that you come, so hot and young and innocent. You smell like a human. I can smell your heart. It’s like a rich meal, set out just for me. And I should know by now: Rich meals laid out as if by magic, in the wood, unlooked-for—those are seductions. And even though I know you are an Ivan and you exist to make me betray my husband, I still want to kiss you. To feel the life in you seize on the life in me. Raw and fresh and new. And you—you have not even seen my face, but I can feel the shock of your desire in my shoulder blades. The shape of me, the size of me—already you will not leave this tent without me.”

“Yes,” breathed Ivan.

“Yet you insist on your innocence.”

“I only found you by accident. I followed a trail of bodies.”

“Then maybe I am seducing you, too.”

“It’s a grisly kind of bride gift,” Ivan said, and did not laugh.

“Maybe every soldier I killed fell in just a certain way, to lead you out of your world and to me. Maybe my body did it without my knowing, the strokes of my sword, the shots of my rifle.” Had she? Marya felt as though all her limbs were connected by thin threads, and a wind would blow her apart. Who was she to know what those disconnected limbs wanted, what they did when she was not looking? “But it’s not so bad as you think. Most of the soldiers are just empty, cloth, with a little breath in them, a thimbleful of blood. It troubles no one when they are torn. Well. No one that matters. But some, yes. Some are grisly. Some were alive.”

Marya gasped as Ivan placed his hand on her waist. She had not heard him move toward her. Had not been on guard. And what had he looked like before he came into her tent? Had he fallen from a tree? Had he been a crow, a robin, a sparrow? No. Not him. He had been a man, out there and in here. There was no bird in him. Ivan did not circle her waist with his arm, was not possessive. He just rested his palm against the curve of her, hesitant. The nearness of him crushed her, like being held by the sun. His gravity pulled at her ears; his breath blossomed against her neck. He whispered, unseen, as close as a ghost, and she could not understand why he was saying this to her, not at first. But the sound of him speaking, the vibrations of his words against the bottom of her skull, moved in her like soldiers, staking territory, gaining ground.

“When I was a boy,” he said, “my grandfather died. My mother was very close to him, and for a year we visited his grave every day. But I was a boy, restless, so I wandered away from her. Her grief was a closed house, and it made me afraid. I learned to read from the gravestones, sounding out each letter in the long grass. One in particular struck me. A little one, no bigger than a schoolbook. Dorshmaii Velichko, it said. 1891–1900. Underneath it said: For death hath no dominion over her. I didn’t know what dominion meant. But I imagined Dorshmaii over and over, with black hair or blond hair, taller than me, not so tall as me. A long braid, or short hair like a boy. She would be my friend and read gravestones with me. She would be haughty and shun me and I would love her anyway. I would reveal my loyalty to her quietly; I would declare my love in loud songs and promises. I thought of her all the time, and those words: Death hath no dominion over her. And then one day when my mother went to see grandfather and I went to see Dorshmaii, there was an old woman standing near her grave with a brown scarf over her head. One of her stockings had fallen down. The old woman had set up a table among the tombs and she was setting it with food: bread and relishes and dumplings and big green grapes and little chocolate candies and an old samovar full of tea. She set places at the table like someone was coming to eat with her. But she didn’t eat. She turned around like she knew I was there and held out her arms to me. ‘Eat,’ she said. ‘Eat.’ I was shy. I didn’t know the woman. ‘Please,’ she said. ‘My son died in the war. He was all I had in the world. That is him, there. Vitaliy. My Vitaliy. I will never see him again. There is a hole in me like a bullet. I want to feed everyone who is not my son, to keep them living. I want no one to have holes in them. I have no one anymore whose mother I can be. Eat, eat. Here are some blintzes, sweet boy; here is cheese pastry. Eat. Be fat. Be alive.’ And I ate her food while the rainclouds drifted in. I have never eaten anything sweeter. I left grapes on Dorshmaii’s grave, and I never went back. The day after I ate the old woman’s bread and cheese, my mother finished her grieving, and took me to the park instead. I never went back.”

Marya shut her eyes. She thought of a hut in a dark wood; a heavy table. “Why are you telling me this?”

Ivan Nikolayevich leaned his head against her hair. “What I am saying is, in this graveyard, I would like to feed you, so that you will not have holes in you like bullets. Sit at my table, Marya Morevna. Let me be a mother to you. Be fat. Be alive.”

And Marya turned. She saw a young man, but not so young, with a broad, sun-reddened face and dark gold hair, like a coin that has often changed hands. His eyes were tea-colored and crinkled at the edges, and this made them look kind. She clenched her jaw to show him that she was not kind, would never be.

Around his arm he wore a red band, an old scarf, knotted like a ludicrous sort of knight’s favor. Marya touched it with her fingertips gently. She thought for a moment it might go up in flames. That it might vanish rather than allow her touch. A person, but not of the People. But it stayed soft and bright in her hand.

“You are so hard, Marya Morevna. You could cut me. Why are you so hard?”

“Because I joined the army and all my friends died.”

And then she burst into tears, her first tears since that awful night-wedding. She rested, just for a moment, her burning forehead against the chest of Ivan Nikolayevich.

16 The Constant Sorrow of the Dead

During the Great War, the Tsar of Death came closest to victory. His great strength has always been in numbers, and in patience. Death can always afford to wait.

It was in those lightless years that the Tsaritsa of Salt was killed.

In the Land of Death, Viy grew rich. The treasuries of death filled up with burnt grain and apples, with starved cattle and blighted potatoes. The cafes of the dead filled up with patrons drinking spilled coffee and reading banned books. Souls were relieved to come to Viy’s country, for they were not shot at there, nor did they get dysentery, nor did any of their friends suffer. Viy made his country as like the living world as he could, even to building film houses where silvery images of the war showed, so that the dead might be grateful and not wish to return to life. For this is the constant sorrow of the dead, that though they drink and eat and dream much as they did before, they know they are dead, and yearn desperately to live again, to feel blood inside them once more, to remember who they were. For the memory of the dead is short, and thought by thought they lose all sense of their former lives until they drift from place to place as shades, their eyes hollow. After a time, they believe they are alive again.

So it was that Viy sent his chief boyars among his people to announce that if any among them would serve in his army, he would send them home when their terms of service ended. Home, to Life, to hearth and blood and labor. He lied, and they knew he lied, but the dead can live for a long while on such a diet. No longer would the Tsar of Death be content to wither corn on the stalk or slowly rot men with infections. He would attack the source of all he hated, the Tsar of Life. After all, why should he dine on the ashes of living feasts? Why should he be held in less esteem than his brother? Why shouldn’t the Empire of Death surpass any earthly power?

And they tore the streets of Buyan piece from piece. The territory of Death advanced one inch each day; the territory of Life retreated. But the next day the territory of Life would advance, and Death retreat. While Viy’s ranks filled up with human dead from the French front and the German lowlands, he would not lie still. To walk down Skorohodnaya Road was a heedless hurtling through patches of dark and light. That cobblestone might belong to the enemy, and to touch it with one toe called their dogs. Soon Buyan became a country of dancers, leaping and turning and crawling to remain in their own country and not slip, putting just a fingernail, just a strand of hair, into Viy’s territory.

In those days the Tsaritsa of Salt called herself neutral. She would not take part. She worried and wept over the cities of the human world, where she made her home and took in morality plays and entertained pigeons in her pale parlor. But even there the Country of Death showed through in patches: Men and women would fall dead in the streets, having sunk their foot, all unknowing, into that invisible and depthless world. The Tsaritsa of Salt defended the cities as best she could, laying the endless salt of her body over the snowy holes where Death bled through. Each time she saw an old grandmother tottering, her eyes rolling back in her head, the Tsaritsa of Salt threw herself toward the babushka to catch her, give her salted bread, and set her aright. Soon the Tsar of Death hated her more even than the Tsar of Life and sent his chief boyars, all of who had mouths like crocodiles and wings hung with jangling knives, to cut her to pieces and scatter the pieces throughout Russia, so that she would never repair.

It is not easy to kill a Tsaritsa. But Viy was bold, and his boyars hewed her arm from leg from neck, and threw down her salt-crystal kokoshnik from a great height, so that it shattered. Without her, the cities began to starve and joined Viy in great sheaves, not only souls but opera houses shelled to dust, and apartments exploded one unit from the next, and factories obliterated by gasoline.

It is said that Viy married the left arm of the Tsaritsa of Salt to finally silence her completely, and that it rests, fingers rigid with grief and rage, on a throne of knucklebones in the heart of the Country of Death.

“Do you understand?” Marya looked up from Likho’s black book and stared intently at Ivan, searching for signs of disbelief. If he didn’t believe her, then she would not love him. Crazy girl. You’re a crazy girl. Why would you say things like that? Silently, she willed him not to believe her, to make this easier.

“Koschei is the Tsar of Life and you are married to him. And that’s why you lead his armies.”

“Yes, but it’s the part about the sinkholes you ought to listen to. If I’m going to take you home you must listen to me, and do exactly as I say.”

Ivan kissed her instead. Oh, thought Marya, I will not survive this. Why do men come knocking at my door? Why do they take their hats off and look at me with big deer eyes and bare their necks? If they stayed home and gave their kitchen tables such stares, I might have a little peace.

“We have to travel through Viy’s country to get back to Buyan. It is not far, but you must step just as I step, and breathe just as I breathe, and speak only as I speak. Everything is contested ground now. If you picked up a single leaf in this forest, it would have a dead side and a living side. You may see people you once loved, once knew. You cannot speak to them, or they will pull you close and never let go. You cannot even look at them. If they wear a splash of silver on their chests, you must turn your face away.”

“What about my camp? They will worry about me. I will be classified as missing, or dead.”

Marya gave him a withering look. She could not care about his little camp. Leningrad was far enough away. The war would not have reached there yet. It would be beautiful there; the lime trees would be just flowering. Violinists would play something sweet and nostalgic in a cafe Marya would just barely remember. She could stop. Just stop. And sleep. Get me away from this war, human. Why are you being so slow about it? “You know, when I was in your position, Koschei said ‘get your things and come with me.’ And I didn’t make such a fuss about it.”

Ivan blanched a little. He coughed. “Well, Marya, when someone says that to you these days, it’s not so nice. Usually … usually it means ‘you’re coming to my camp.’”

“Then you should be glad to leave your camp, if it is such an awful place.”

“Kiss me again, Marya, and I’ll go anywhere.”

She did. It felt like firing her rifle, and watching a firebird fall out of the sky. Who would I have been, she thought, as his mouth warmed hers, if I had never seen the birds? If I had never been sick with magic? Would I have loved a man like this, so simple and easy and young?

After ten years, Marya Morevna could see the markings of the Country of Death. It left a stamp, like a customs officer, on every part of the world it touched. Sometimes the stamp looked like a shadow with pinpricks of silver in it, like stars. Sometimes it looked like ripples of water reflected on the bottom of a pier. Sometimes, when she had to pass through their strongholds, it looked like an imperial seal with a three-headed bear raising six paws in rage. It was always better not to look, though, to look only at the Country of Life as it wound its slender path through Viy’s territory, the marks of Buyan, a kind of thin winter sunlight, the smells of things baking, of everything green.

“Marya,” Ivan hissed as they walked back and back, toward her home, toward her husband. “Someone is following us.”

“I told you not to speak. I know. They’re … they’re always following me, Ivan. Always.”

Marya did not have to turn around. They would surely smile at her, their eyes lighting with hope like gaslights, their silvery chests blazing. A little man with a head like a stone, a girl with a rifle scope where one eye should be, and a lady with swan feathers in her hair. Always. She could smell Lebedeva’s perfume, violets and orange-water.

“I told you. You may see people you once loved. You cannot speak to them, or they will pull you close and never let go. It would be like leaping into Death’s country with both feet. I cannot talk to them, not ever.” Marya’s head swam. She had never spoken of them, her dead friends, and how they hounded her, how they wanted her still; Koschei did not sympathize. I love you, he said. I did not die. Is that not enough? Can you not befriend some other soul in Buyan? “I cannot touch them. Military service is not meant to be easy.”

Marya Morevna slid forward on her right foot, crossing three large, flat stones without lifting it. She picked up her left foot over the same stones and brought her legs together. Ivan mimicked her. She followed the path she knew, stepping only on every seventh patch of dirt, only every third fallen leaf. She got on her belly to squeeze under a hoary, mushroom-clotted tree trunk rather than stepping over it. She did not look behind her, or to either side. She moved like a snake moves, and carefully breathed only every second breath. But at last they came to the place Marya feared, where there was no safe path marked with shadows or ripples or seals. There was only a black patch in the mountains, utterly without light. Far in the distance, like a painting, the evening hills opened up again, violet with mist and the last spoonfuls of sunlight. Marya Morevna reached behind her. Ivan took her hand tightly in his, and she could feel his fear like sweat. His fear made her stronger; she could be brave for both of them. Together they stepped into the black field.

Their footfalls echoed as though they walked through an invisible city street, though beneath their feet they felt only soft loam. Little bursts of sound floated by: rough tavern braying; the shattering of heavy things; pottery and wood; a fiddle, played low and fast. Marya’s eyes widened in the dark. I am safe, she told herself. I have passage. I have always had passage. They will not reach for me.

“Ivan Nikolayevich,” a little voice called, full of joy and recognition.

“Don’t turn your head,” Marya hissed. “Keep walking. Keep with me.”

“Ivan Nikolayevich, it’s me!” the voice rang out again.

“If you look, it will be your death and you will never kiss me or smoke a cigarette or taste butter again,” Marya warned through clenched teeth. Her jaw ached from clenching—every part of her closed up, bound tight.

“Ivanushka, it’s Dorshmaii. Come and hug me at last!”

And Marya felt him turn, pulling her with him.

The voice belonged to a young girl with pale braids done up in the old style, like two teardrops hanging from her head. She had on a lace dress and her smile looked like a photograph: pristine, practiced, frozen. She held out her arms.

“Oh, Ivanushka, I have waited so long! How loyal you were at my grave. How sweet were the grapes you left me! Ivan, come and kiss me! I dreamed of you kissing me while all the worms were knocking at my coffin.”

Ivan’s broad face lit like a lantern. “Dorshmaii! Oh! You are blond, after all! And kind.”

“So kind!” the silvery girl agreed, her braids bobbing as she nodded. “Everyone here says so. I always share my ashes!”

Ivan Nikolayevich drew back a little. Marya tried to pull him away, but he was big and stubborn and he would see this through. More fool you. Marya gave up. I warned you. “What do you mean?” he said uncertainly.

Dorshmaii Velichko took a cigarette out of the sash of her dress and put it into her mouth. It had all been smoked. The cigarette was a long column of ash. But she breathed in happily, and the ash slowly turned white again, until it was whole. She held it out to Ivan.

“You can have it, now. I know you like them. I saved it for you.”

“Don’t you dare,” snapped Marya.

Ivan did not reach for it. Dorshmaii shrugged and dropped it, grinding it into the ground with her dainty foot. “It’s no good to me now. All used up. Oh, but you are not used up, Ivan! You are so warm and bright I can hardly look at you! Thick and full of juice, that’s you! Like a green grape! Come and share my bed, like you always wanted. And I know you wanted to, even then, you wicked little thing.”

Ivan stared at her. His hand in Marya’s went slack, and she could feel him flow towards the girl like water pouring from one glass to another.

“Dorshmaii,” Marya said, without raising her voice. She had hoped he would be strong enough on his own, that she would not have to use her authority. She was ready to lay it down, so ready. “He is under my shield.”

The girl in the lace dress looked from Ivan to her and back again. “I don’t think your shield extends to playthings, little Tsaritsa. Let me have him. I’ll ride him to Georgia and back before morning. He’ll bleed from my spurs. Then you can have him back.”

Marya reached for the pale, intricately carved rifle slung over her back. She loved her rifle. There was no other like it. She had found it in Naganya’s house, so long ago. The vintovnik had whittled it out of the bones of the firebird they had killed on their hunt, the last time they were all together, meaning it to be a wedding present. Marya Morevna brought it to bear on the ghost and adjusted the sighting.

“Don’t!” cried Ivan.

“Oh!” Dorshmaii breathed. “It’s so beautiful! I can see the flames still! Oh, Marya Morevna, you have no right to a weapon like that! Give it to me! See, the bird opens its mouth to me; it wants to be mine!”

Marya fired. One of the girl’s teardrop-shaped braids dropped off.

“Oh, I hate you,” Dorshmaii spat. “I had him first. It’s not fair!”

Blood seeped from the stem of her braid, yellowish and thick. A clump of black, dripping earth struck the ghost between the eyes, and she screeched in indignation. Ivan whirled to see who had thrown it.

“Stop looking, Ivan! I told you to listen to me! You can’t look at them!” But Marya, unable to let him go or lose him to the dark, was looking, too, as a little man with a beard of pale, frosty moss and hands like broken stones gathered up another handful of earth and tested it in his hand. A silver splash stained his chest. He looked only once at Marya, and big tears welled up in his eyes, falling like rain.

“Run, Ivan,” Marya whispered.

He did. And behind them, the dark spasmed, as if in grief.

When they reached the light, Marya seized him close to her, spun around three times, laid her finger on the side of her nose, and disappeared.

17 A Pain Where My Death Once Lay

“We’re home,” Marya sighed. “This is home.”

But Ivan went white and trembled in his long grey coat. He looked at the blood fountains gurgling and spraying. He looked at the braids lying along the eaves, the chapels with their skin doors and bone crosses, the gate of antler and skulls. He looked at the black domes of the Chernosvyat looming before them, all shadows.

“This is hell,” he whispered. Marya saw his hand twitch, longing to cross himself, keeping his fingers still for her sake alone—and she liked that, that in his horror he still wished to please her.

“No, no, it’s not like that. It’s the Country of Life. It’s all living, see? The blood and the skin and the bone and the fur. It’s all alive. Nothing is dead here, nothing. It’s beautiful.”

But Ivan was shaking his golden head. “At least in Leningrad we build over the bones.”

Marya Morevna laughed. She wanted to brush his hair from his eyes. “Of course you are from Leningrad,” she said. It would not be temptation if he came from Moscow, or Minsk, or Irkutsk. Only a boy from her home could come bearing an old red scarf and scratch at her core. He had been built for her, like a perfect machine.

“I don’t want to stay here!” he cried. “This is the devil’s country!”

“Of course it is,” said a deep voice, familiar to Marya as her own bed. “And you should go home immediately.”

Koschei the Deathless swept Marya into his arms. She smiled—a frank, open smile, unguarded and bright as winter. She kissed him, and where their mouths joined, drops of their blood spontaneously welled and mingled, so deeply did their bodies interlock.

“Have you brought a toy?” Koschei said curiously, setting his wife down, his long black cassock whipping in the heavy Buyan wind. “Is he for me as well?”

Marya watched his face carefully. If she played it right, if she managed it, no one would be hurt. “He found me, at Irkutsk, after the battle. He is from Leningrad.”

Koschei the Deathless grinned enormously, his black hair lifting a little, blowing in the wind. “Oh, my Marya has grown up and started stealing humans for herself! I am proud.”

“It isn’t like that.” But wasn’t it? Hadn’t she appeared to him like a bird-husband, out of nowhere, and dragged him out of the world?

Koschei turned to the young officer. “Oh? What do you think, young man? Is it like that?”

Ivan was somewhat beside himself. He could not stop staring at the fountain of blood, how the sun turned it half-black.

“Is he mute? Does he have a name?”

Marya faltered and cast down her eyes. She could not say it, could not begin to bring herself to say the name Ivan in the presence of her husband. But he guessed it. He saw it caught in her mouth like a fish hook. They had been married a long time. Koschei’s black eyes flared fury; his jaw clenched, just like hers. What mirrors we are, set to face each other, reflecting desire.

“You would not do that to me, would you, Masha? Tell me he is Dmitri Grigorovich. Tell me he is Leonid Belyayev. Tell me his name is Priapus and you could not resist him. But my wife would not bring an Ivan into my house; she would not stab me so, through the neck.”

“I thought there were no rules between us,” Marya answered softly, somewhat embarrassed to discuss it in front of Ivan himself, who was no part of their marriage, and should not hear its private arrangements.

Koschei blinked twice and straightened his back, crow-hunched with resentment.

“Of course you are right, wife. I have forgotten myself. What is a name? Nothing and no one. I am a silly old man.” His smile froze on his perfect face, the youthful curve of his jaw, his eyes not even a little wrinkled with age. He remained utterly the man who had appeared on Marya’s doorstep with stars in his hair. “You must bring your friend to dinner, and we will discuss our options, with regard to the war.”

The Tsar of Life turned on one shining black heel and strode toward his palace. Over his shoulder he called, “Oh, have a care not to walk on the right side of the road. We lost it while you were gone.”

Marya brought her hand to her mouth. She had not seen it. How could she have missed it? A long black strip ran down Skorohodnaya Road. In the darkness, silver pricked like stars.

Koschei served them himself: pheasant on a black platter; diamond goblets of colorless wine; two loaves of bread, one dark and one pale; pears poached in a fragrant sauce Marya did not recognize. A mound of shining butter rested in front of Ivan’s seat with a small golden knife sunk into it. Marya wore a long black dress, its silk bodice scooping well below her neckline, its gems winking. Koschei loved it specially, and she wished to make peace. You look like a winter night, he had told her when he had given it to her. I could sleep inside the cold of you. She tried not to look at either of the men.

“Eat,” Koschei said tonelessly. “You will need strength for the road.”

Ivan folded his hands in his lap. “I … I don’t think I ought to eat your food, Comrade,” he said shakily.

Koschei sneered at him. “Why not? You have already supped at my table, tasted my wife. I can smell it on both of you, like perfume so sweet it sickens.”

Marya put down her fork. “Why are you doing this, Koschei? I have had lovers before. You have, too. Remember Marina? The rusalka? She and I swam together every morning. We raced the salmon. You called us your little sharks.”

The Tsar of Life held his knife so tightly Marya could see his knucklebones bulging. “Were any of them called Ivan? Were any of them human boys all sticky with their own innocence? I know you. I know you because you are like me, as much like me as two spoons nested in each other.” Her husband leaned close to her, the candlelight sparking in his dark, shaggy hair. “When you steal them, they mean so much more, Marousha. Trust me. I know. What did I do wrong? Was I boring? Did I ignore you? Did I not give you enough pretty dresses? Enough emeralds? I’m sure I have more, somewhere.”

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.”

Koschei grabbed her hand, dragging her by her wrist from her chair and into his lap. The dishes clattered and spilled pears onto the floor. Blood streaked her palm where his nails scratched her, and he kissed it, kissed her thumb, her ring finger, until his chin was smeared red. “How I adore you, Marya. How well I chose. Scold me; deny me. Tell me you want what you want and damn me forever. But don’t leave me.”

Marya studied him, searching his face, so dear, unchanging, unchangeable. Ivan reached for her hand under the table, but she had forgotten him. She felt his fingers no more than a napkin folded across her skin. Koschei loomed so great in her vision, all shadows. He filled her up, her whole world, a moon obliterating the light of any other star. She thatched her fingers into his hair like a ram’s wool. “Take my death away,” she said. “Cut it away. Cut it up, lock it in a duck’s eye. Behind four dogs. Make me like you, as if we are two spoons. Then I will never leave you.” Koschei gently took her hand from his head and laid it in her lap. “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.”

“Yet you demand my loyalty, my whole heart, my marrow.”

“Those things are mine. You don’t understand, Masha. You have never understood. You are my treasure, my pale gold, the heart of my heart. You lie at the bottom of my being and gnaw upon my roots. But you are not one of us. No matter how like us you become. You were not with us when the world was so young, so easily misled. When there was only one star in the sky. You cannot know what we know. You are not built as we are built. You’ve learned so much, you have, and I am so proud of you. But you…” Koschei laid his hand on the black silk of her sternum. “You are still made of meat, and gristle, and bone.”

She searched his eyes, without depth, without end. How she loved him, still, forever. He was the source of that hot, sickening, gorgeous magic, and he poured it into her like wine. “What are you made of?” she asked, her bitter anger softening. Perhaps I can stand this war for you a little longer. If I can keep you by me, and Ivan, too. No rules, not ever.

“Not meat,” Koschei said gently. “Not even blood.” He took up her fingers again, passing them over his lips so that their bloody stains left smears there. “I put on blood for you like a cosmetic, just like I put on this face, and this body all full of leanness and litheness. It is to please you, only to please you, my human girl, my volchitsa. Didn’t you know? Didn’t you guess? But it’s no good, Masha. You carry your death in every cell of you. Every tiny mote in your body is dying, faster than sleight of hand. You are always dying, every second. How could I take that out of you? My death is not so diffuse. I have only one. You have millions. Not even my sister, my darling sister whom you know so well, not even Yaga asks me to take her death. Do you know why?”

Marya Morevna kept silent. She could think of only one thing; her whole mind clutched it: What do you look like without your face? Who are you, husband? I will see it. I will.

“Because she knows how I did it to myself. You would not think it of her, that she could be tender. But we were so young then, and there is a kind of understanding between brothers and sisters. A history shared. I will not tell you, my love. You are what you are and I think you might try it, just to show me you could. I will say it was something like how you came here with me, and something like letting a wolf eat my liver every day for a thousand years, and something like slowly suffocating in a gas the color of jaundice, and something like dying every second, to avoid ever dying. There is still a place in me, Masha, where my death once lay. I have a pain there, the way some men feel their legs long after they’ve been cut off at the knee. It is my pain, and I cannot share it. I would not, even if I could. I will age with you, if it will please you. I will match you, wrinkle for wrinkle, grey hair for grey hair, creak for creak, tumor for tumor. You will be so beautiful when you are old.”

“Death hath no dominion,” said Ivan, and both Marya and Koschei turned to stare at the young man as if he had appeared out of nowhere. Marya’s attention was a cat’s attention, now. Whatever she wanted most held her utterly, so that she abandoned emphatically anything other than the object of her fixation. And then something new would appear and she clapped it with the same impenetrable stare. She knew herself, how she had slowly, over years, become a cat, a wolf, a snake, anything but a girl. How she had wrung out her girlhood like a death. And now Ivan sat there, studiously not eating his bread smeared thickly with butter, waiting for her attention, her regard, but she could forget him in a moment if Koschei pulled her towards him like a little moon, and she knew it, and she felt herself splitting and tearing between them, her human heart, her demon heart.

“Well said,” Koschei allowed him, generosity coating his words. “Please, boy, eat. I promise, no one will appear and cackle at you that you must now stay here six months of the year. You must be starving for a glistening bit of meat.”

Ivan stared at the butter, how it shone. “You said this was the devil’s country.”

“So I did. Then I must be the devil. And she the devil’s bride. Aren’t you lucky, to have fallen in with such exciting people?”

Marya tried to help him. She remembered when this was hard. “He’s only teasing you, Ivan.”

Koschei snarled suddenly, his lips drawing back from sharp and suddenly yellowish, blackened teeth. He threw his goblet against the wall. It did not shatter, but thudded heavily to the floor.

“Not that name,” he growled. “Not in my house. Call him something else, if you insist on dragging home strays.”

Marya rose from his lap, her loose hair falling towards his face like a leash. He would deny her, no matter what he said. She did not feel a pain where his denial sat, not anymore. In fact, Marya did not feel much of anything besides want, an endless want that coiled in her, that lashed out for Koschei, for wine and goose and melon, for the hilt of her bone rifle. The want survived any fight, with her fists, with her guns. It was a wolf, tenacious. It had swallowed up Ivan Nikolayevich. She could not remember, now, ever having felt happy or sad. Only hungry. Only empty, and greedy, and insatiable. It was as though she had never taken off that leather apron, that black fur coat, that terrible red paint.

Koschei kept her hand, tight in his cold fist.

“Don’t leave me,” he said helplessly. “No rules but that rule. Don’t leave me.”

Koschei the Deathless allowed Ivan to sleep in Marya’s house. He liked to show magnanimity. He liked to be expansive, so long as he didn’t really have to share in the end. Thus Marya was not surprised when he caught her by a length of hair and drew her back to him once Ivan’s golden head had disappeared down the hall of the Chernosvyat. He wound her hair in his hand, running his thumb over it.

“All my onyxes, my agates, my obsidian. All my black treasures in this one strand,” Koschei murmured. “How long your hair has grown. You could strangle a man in it.”

Marya took her hair from his fist and lifted it, heavy as a rope, twisting it around his neck, bringing his face close to hers. He smelled like barley and old trees. But then, maybe he smelled that way only because it pleased her. Marya Morevna shivered in her husband’s arms. He pressed his forehead to hers, shutting his long-lashed eyes.

“You should go with him,” Koschei whispered harshly, “when he asks you. You should go, and have his babies and kiss their wounds and teach them to read.”

“You don’t mean that.” The air between them was thick, knotted.

“I don’t mean it.” He pushed her back, away from the black feast table, against a long, broad wall all covered in silver tapestries showing peacocks and apples and archangels with long teeth. Save for the long chains hanging from the eyes of one peacock’s tail. “I don’t mean it. Stay with me forever, forever, until you die, and then, still, I will keep your bones and clutch them to my breast.” He lifted one of her arms and clapped it into the chain. Marya knew those chains. She owned them, had tamed them. Though she wanted to speak plainly, calmly, her heart leapt as the locks caught. Her breath found itself. She searched his eyes, ducking her head to catch his gaze.

“Koschei, it’s me. Your Masha, your Marousha. What do I want with wounded babies?”

He bound up her other arm against the silver brocade, and Marya hung there, helpless. But her blood and her wanting lashed themselves, and of all the times she had hung against Koschei’s wall, she knew that this time she was not helpless at all. His fear wrote itself on every familiar angle of his face.

“But if you go with him, you will not be safe. Viy will not always respect our treaties. The accords only keep you alive—they do not keep you happy, or unmaimed, or those you love anything near safe. I bargained for you, not for any other. If you leave me, he will come for you one day with silver shears, and you will fall. If he were not a coward and bound by me, he would have done it already.”

“You do not need to send me away for my own good like a child. I chose to fight, and I still choose it.” But as she said it Marya Morevna knew she lied. She wanted an end to war. An end to cold and blackness and half the road gone silver with death.

Koschei went to an armoire and took out a long birch branch, white and thin.

“I meant to give you a life of greed and plenty,” he said, moving the branch over the tops of her breasts. “I wanted to keep you innocent, so that I would always have your purity to eat, every breakfast and every supper. You can be innocent again. It’s not true, what they say, that you can never get it back. You can. It’s only that most folk cannot be bothered.” Koschei the Deathless hooked his fingers into the glittering neckline of her dress and tore it with deliberation, down to the hem. Tiny gems clattered to the floor. Marya shut her eyes; her body arched toward him, the little striped animal that it had become, desperate and starving, always. This, this kept her here. Alive, aflame. At the end of fighting this wall, this man, these chains woke her heart again.

“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.

“Well,” she purred, “I like all of those things, too. I don’t want to choose between them. Koschei doesn’t make me choose.”

“Yes,” Ivan said softly, stroking her face with his hand. “He does. It’s only that he makes stripping off your skin taste like fresh butter and feel like sunlight on wheat.”

Marya frowned. If he would only ask her, if he would only behave like a bird, like a man in black, she would find all this so much easier. “Ivan, you do not understand us. A marriage is a private thing. It has its own wild laws, and secret histories, and savage acts, and what passes between married people is incomprehensible to outsiders. We look terrible to you, and severe, and you see our blood flying, but what we carry between us is hard-won, and we made it just as we wished it to be, just the color, just the shape.”

Ivan kissed her, hesitantly, sweetly, as a boy kisses a girl on the schoolyard. Her mouth flowed with warmth.

“Look how you kiss me, Marya Morevna,” he whispered, “while you tell me what marriage is!”

“It is selfish to hoard resources, Ivan Nikolayevich, when we might share, each according to need. Why can I not have both? Both of you, Leningrad and Buyan, pickled and fresh, man and bird?”

He kissed her again, deeper, and the taste of him in her mouth was bright, brighter than blood.

“What do we carry between us, then, Masha?”

“Nothing,” she breathed. What he dared, to call her Masha so soon! “Yet.”

Marya Morevna gripped his shoulders in her hands and pushed him down beneath her. She clamped his narrow hips between her lion-thighs and kissed him with all the biting and possessing she had learned, with everything she had to give to a kiss. Her hair swept over his face, a black curtain, hiding all light, plunging him inescapably into her.

Ivan clapped his hand to the back of her neck, moving under her, arching his back to press closer. He moaned under her, his coin-colored lashes so long, like a girl’s.

“Come with me, back to Leningrad,” he whispered. “Come back.” There. There, he has asked. And I must choose. War before me, and behind, a woman I do not know, the woman I could have been, a human woman, whole and hot.

And in the depths of herself, Marya felt her old house on Gorokhovaya Street, on Kommissarskaya Street, on Dzerzhinskaya Street, unfold and creak and beckon, and the sounds of the Neva gurgle greenly. Things she had not allowed herself to remember came pouring out of Ivan’s kisses, out of his skin, out of his seed. She smelled the sea. But 1942 is not so far off now, she thought desperately, his warmth suffusing her whipped belly. Not so far.

And the heart of Ivan Nikolayevich broke inside the body of Marya Morevna, and the pieces of him lodged deep in her bones, and through the window, the stars watched.

Later, after they had shared water and a few slices of ruby meat, Marya saw the red scarf Ivan Nikolayevich had had knotted around his arm peeking out from beneath his jacket. She bent and touched its tip, which protruded like a tongue.

Ivan smiled a little. “It’s my Young Pioneers scarf. I don’t know why I still carry it. I just like it. It made me feel safe when I was young. Made me feel good, as though I could not be harmed, because I was so good, because I belonged.”

He looked at her for a long moment, his warm tea-colored eyes darkened by candlelight until they were almost black, like Koschei’s. But Ivan’s gaze held her in a circle of heat and quiet night truths. Marya said nothing; held her breath. And then he did it, and she thought her body would shake itself apart. Ivan Nikolayevich untied the scarf from his coat and hung it around Marya Morevna’s naked neck, lifting her long hair over its cloth, so that the tails hung down over her breasts, covering them in scarlet like bloody tears.

Marya woke in the bottomless well before dawn, her eyes snapping open in the dark. She sat up straight, Ivan a pleasant warm heap beside her, insensate. A silvery white woman sat at her vanity, her long, pale fingers touching the pots, one by one. Her white hair hung loose to her waist. She wore a cameo, a perfect carving of a woman with long pale hair and a silver star on her breast.

“Mashenka, my darling,” Madame Lebedeva sighed. “How I miss you. How I wish you would talk to me.”

The vila turned, and the silver star on her chest cast sinuous shadows on the ceiling. Her eyelids were painted a lighter color than Marya had ever seen.

“I won’t hurt you,” the ghost said softly. “I won’t. All these years, and you still don’t know I would never drag you after me, not ever. It is the terrible hour when anything may be said. I have waited for this hour. Speak one word to me, Masha. Acknowledge me. I love you. Once you are dead, shame sloughs off like an old shirt. It costs nothing to be plain about such things. I love you. Do you not love me?”

Marya’s eyelids slid heavily closed again—but she forced them open. And she did look, intently, at her old friend. She could hardly bear her face. She wanted to run to her and be held, but no, no, never again. Never. She would not mean to drag Marya off, but it would happen anyway, like gravity, like falling a long way. She did not want to speak. But the weight of those years spent not looking behind her, not noticing the silver footsteps at her back, oh, that weight sat heavy in her lap.

“I love you, Lebed,” Marya Morevna said finally, and wept, slowly, without sound, without tears. She had dried up, utterly.

“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.” Madame Lebedeva touched the mirror, looking at herself as though she were a very beautiful stranger. A wet, silver stain spread out from her fingertip over the glass like frost forming.

“Did it hurt?” Marya whispered. “When you died?”

“I don’t remember. I was bringing your veil—really, how could you get married without a veil, Masha? It’s shameful. I was bringing it and someone shot me. I thought I had tripped over something for a moment, and then the assassin took me in his arms—oh, how silver they gleamed!—and put his mouth to my wound. He suckled like a babe, and I thought, I will never suckle anyone, not ever—and then I died. It was like pulling on a rope as hard as you can and then suddenly it jerks free and you fall, because you were straining so hard that you couldn’t help going over the edge. I put flowers on my body. I was so fond of it. And, you know, during the struggle for the Chernosvyat, a phosphor-shell hit the old magicians’ cafe. Now it’s in our country, and I can eat there whenever I like. Dust soup, dust dumplings. Little tartlets of ash.” Lebedeva pointed at Marya suddenly; her voice sharpened. “You ought to go with Ivan, Masha. Listen to your friend. She is still a magician. She still knows things.”

“It will break Koschei’s heart.” She had decided to stay. She had decided to go. In her sleep she had decided a thousand times. Her dreams were split in half.

“Eh. It’s been broken before. And it isn’t a heart. You have to look out for yourself. Soon enough my lord will decide he has had enough of your rifle and come to feast on you, treaty or no treaty. Why should you not have some peace before then? Leningrad in 1940—such a quiet place. You could be happy.”

“I hardly know this boy.” Marya drank in the sight of her friend, and a dull ache began between her breasts. She must stop speaking to Lebedeva; she must stop—but she could not.

“You hardly knew Koschei. Abduction is a marvelous icebreaker.”

Marya Morevna passed her hand over her eyes. “Lebed, why? Why would I ever leave Buyan? This is my home.”

“Because this is how it happens. How he dies. How he always dies. The only way he can die. Dying is a part of his marriages, no less than lovemaking. He wouldn’t know what to do if you didn’t kill him at some point.”

“I will never kill him! Even if I go, even if I leave, I wouldn’t kill him!”

“We shall see. But you will go. Because you are still somewhat young and you need the sun on your face, the high Leningrad sun, to redden your cheeks. Go, and sleep easy, and do not think about how many men will die today.”

“Koschei would stop me.” But would he? Perhaps he would simply find another girl. Perhaps it would start all over again, only without Marya Morevna, and she could steal some measure of respite.

“He’s too proud for that. Think he ever stopped the others?”

“I am not like the others.”

“Oh, but Masha, can’t you see? You are. An Ivan has come. That is like saying, Midnight has struck. It is time for bed, little one. You cannot have both. In war you must always choose sides. One or the other. Silver or black. Human or demon. If you try to be a bridge laid down between them, they will tear you in half.”

Marya spread her hands; only Lebedeva could hear her fear, the wounds she had hidden in her jaw, in the space Koschei had made when he took her will. “Lebed, how can I live in that world? I am hardly human. I was only a child—how can I find the girl I was before I knew what magic was? That world will not love me. It will kick me and slap me in the snow, and take my scarf, and leave me ashamed and bleeding.”

“You will live as you live in any world,” Madame Lebedeva said. She reached out her hand as if to grasp Marya’s, as if to press it to her cheek, then closed her fingers, as if Marya’s hand were in hers. “With difficulty, and grief.”

And slowly, with the infinite care of a woman dressing for the theatre, Madame Lebedeva stretched her long, elegant neck—so far, so far!—her breasts fluffing into feathers, her slender legs tucking up beneath her, until she was a swan, a black band across her eyes. She hopped onto the windowsill and flew away into the aching, raw night.

19 Three Sisters

And so Marya Morevna stole the human boy with gold hair, pulling him down the icy, dawn-darkened streets lined with yawning silver echoes. They kept to the left side; they did not look back. Ivan Nikolayevich rode behind her on a horse with red ears and small hooves, who was not of Volchya-Yagoda’s get, but rather his sinister-slantwise nephew, as horses count such things. The horse was possessed of no mechanical leanings whatsoever, only a horse who loved his mistress and thrilled, deep in the memories of his slantwise cells, to be used as an instrument of abduction. Marya, for her part, wondered, as her teeth took cold from the wind, if there could ever be love without this running in the night, this fleeing, this hurtling into dark lands; without the fear that someone, mother or father or husband, might reach out a sorrowful hand to pull her back. Ivan held her around the waist as their horse careened into the forest, heedless of bough or stone. He said nothing. She could think of nothing to say. She had taken him, and what can you say to a taken thing? Her bones jangled in the saddle. Her knee creaked. The old blister below her eye throbbed.

But no hand unhorsed them. No black guard flew through the yellow larches to yank her backwards by the hair. The morning sun pointed redly at them, accusing, righteous. Under its disapproving stare they rode, through the day, into the afternoon. Through the afternoon, and into the night. The stars drew a map of heaven onto the black above.

Finally, the horse with red ears wheezed, spat, and fell to his knees in the snowy shadows of a forest clearing. They had stopped at a great estate, firelight glowing and glimmering in every crystalline window with the cozy wintertime carelessness of the very rich. Stables it surely had, and hay. The horse had led them well. A great glass door stood ever so invitingly ajar. Marya’s eyes swam with the whipping of wind and snow. She peered in, afraid to enter, certain Koschei had set this up for her, to rack her with guilt, to make her remember all those soft, quiet little houses on the road to Buyan. To place himself in their bed, like tobacco appearing noiselessly on a table.

But they were alone. The horse nosed peaceably in the snow. No sound, not even owls, broke the blackness. And so Marya helped Ivan—saddle-sore and shivering in the bitter, rigid cold—across the threshold.

The foyer of the dacha flowed around them, its deep malachite floor speckled with brown jasper, its candelabras all ruby and amethyst. And in the center of the shining floor sat a great egg of blue enamel, crisscrossed with gold leafing and studded with diamonds like nail-heads. Atop the egg perched a middle-aged woman, her fair hair clapped back like a hay-roll in autumn. She peered at two silver knitting needles over her glasses, where half a child’s crimson stocking hung, growing slowly, inch by inch.

Marya’s heart spun in surprise.

“Olga!” she cried out. “How is this possible? How can you have come to be here, so deep in the forest? How can I have found you in all the expanse of the world? It is your sister, Masha!” Marya might have wept, but her tears froze within her, so tired and afraid and stiff was she, so afraid that she was being tricked, that the woman would slide off the egg and bounce up something else, something awful, something accusing.

The woman looked up, and her face shone, all porcelain and pink. She filled like a wineskin with the sight of her sister, and, tucking her knitting under one thick arm, leapt down from her egg and kissed Marya all over her face before turning to Ivan and kissing him very chastely on the cheeks. “Marya! Oh, my darling sister!” she exclaimed, and she smelled so like Olga that it could not have been a trick. “So much time has passed! Look at you, grown as a bear! Ah! When did we stop being children?”

Marya longed to raise up her arms and have Olga lift her and twirl her as she used to, when they were young together in the house on Gorokhovaya Street.

“Olya, are you happy? Are you well?”

“Oh, very well! And with my sixth daughter on the way!” She patted the jeweled egg fondly. “This sort of thing is what comes of marrying a bird.” She winked. “But then, you always knew he was a bird, didn’t you? And you didn’t tell me. Wicked girl. But what about you? Are you happy? Are you well?”

“I am tired,” said Marya Morevna. “Olya, this is Ivan Nikolayevich. He is not a bird.”

Ivan bowed to Marya’s oldest sister.

Olga daintily pushed her glasses up onto her nose. “Oh, I know who he is. Think lieutenants don’t talk, do you? Gossip is like gold in these parts. Just look at my sister, run off, a scandal, and at her age! I’ll have you know I’ve been faithful to Gratch since he first took my arm, and I’ve fourteen precious little chicks to show for it!”

“So many!” Ivan whistled.

Olga narrowed her lovely eyes at him. “Haven’t you heard there’s a war on?” She scowled. “We must all do our part.”

“I’ve told Marya. We’ve a pact with Germany. War does not even dream of Russia. Your sister will be safe in Leningrad.”

“Tfu!” Olga spat. “That’s what you know.” She turned her broad back to him and embraced Marya Morevna once more. “But you must stay the night, refresh your poor horse—what a skinny beast!—eat from my board, drink from my cabinet. You are my sister. What belongs to me belongs to you, even if you are a wicked Delilah with a double ration of men. What is a little bad behavior, among family?”

And so Olga led them to her long ebony table set with bread and pickled peppers and smoked fish, dumplings and beets in vinegar and brown kasha, mushrooms and thick beef tongue and blini topped with little black spoonfuls of caviar and cream. Cold vodka sweated in a crystal decanter. Goose stew bubbled over the hearth. At the head of the table sat a man in a fine black smoking jacket. His head was a glossy-feathered rook, and he snapped cruelly at Marya when she pulled out her chair. Olga kissed his beak and drew him away with her, crooning and chirping to him in the soft, secret language of the wed.

For a moment, left alone, neither Marya nor Ivan moved to eat. Marya’s head hurt. Was it the same food she had eaten so long ago, a child, a nothing, a hungry little wolf? She could not remember. Ivan reached for the vodka with his strong red hand.

“Wait…,” she whispered faintly. “Wait … volchik.” The word thrilled her, rolled off her tongue like something forbidden. Ivan withdrew his fingers. He obeyed her; he trusted her. Marya licked her dry lips. The shape of things moved in her mind. A heat rose in her cheeks. She could hardly speak, so big hung the words in her heart. “Do not speak any more tonight, Ivan Nikolayevich. Instead, listen to me, and do as I say.” Ivan blinked uncertainly and started to protest. Marya clapped a finger over his mouth. She took her hand away. He did not speak. Oh, this is a big thing, she thought. How enormous it feels in me. I did not understand before. “Now.” Her voice quavered a little. She made it firm. “Taste the caviar first.” Marya Morevna cut a thick slab of bread and smeared it with white butter, then spread glistening red roe over it. She held it out to him, and like a child, he ate from her hand. She watched him, distant, a queen on a high chair, but so close to him, so bound to her stolen beauty. “Now, sip your vodka, and then bite one of the peppers—see how the vinegar and the vodka war with one another? This is a rare thing. A winter thing.” Marya’s throat thickened. She spoke around tears. “You can taste summer in this mixture, summer boiled down and soaked in brine. Because that is life, Ivan. Jars on a shelf, bright colors under glass, saved up against the winter, against starving.”

Ivan sighed heavily and put down his glass.

“This is stupid, Marya. I am hungry. Let a man eat in peace.”

He fell to his fish with a passion, and the spell broke messily at her feet. Marya Morevna stared at him, her jaw tightening until she thought her teeth might crack.

When the dawn lit the great house, Marya and Ivan Nikolayevich found Olga once more atop her rich egg, knitting like a hummingbird, too fast to see.

“Masha, my own, my littlest sister,” the matron called down. “Take this with you.”

She bit off her yarn in her teeth and tossed the red ball to Marya, who caught it and squeezed it like fruit at the market. The yarn was softer than any wool, expertly spun, thick.

“It will always lead you back, to your country, to your home. I make all my children’s stockings with the stuff, so they will know how to come home to their mother.” Olga climbed down the cobalt side of the egg and held out her arms to her sister. When Marya stepped into them, Olga lifted her up and twirled her around. Marya laughed despite herself, as she always had.

“Tell our mother I love her, when you get to Leningrad,” Olga said, and kissed Marya on both cheeks. Olga smelled like coins and mothering, and Marya Morevna held her tight.

Thus they traveled, into the dawn, into the afternoon. Through the dusk, and into the night. The stars stitched intricate patterns onto the dark hoop above. Still, no pale knife flashed out of the forest to pierce Marya’s heart, nor lift Ivan Nikolayevich’s head from his shoulders.

Finally, the horse with red ears fell to his knees in a meadow full of spiky, sharp herbs that poked up out of the snow, ringed with birch trees like bones. A smaller house stood in a clearing of hard ice and snow so cold their boots squeaked when they stepped upon it. Half the windows glowed with firelight; horse-breath steamed from half the stables. A great wooden door stood ever-so-invitingly ajar. Marya’s eyes ached. She wanted to close them forever. Instead, she helped Ivan Nikolayevich, his knees shaking from the long ride, across the threshold.

The foyer of the house lay around them, its deep maplewood floor dotted with handsome squares of ash, its candelabras all bone and antler, a hunter’s trophies. And in the center of the shining floor sat a great egg, its warm, freckled brown shell crisscrossed with rose-colored ribbons. Atop the egg sat a sly, ruddy woman, her grey eyes snapping at every fascinating thing. She peered at a basket of apples on her lap over the rims of a pair of glasses, and sliced each one in seven pieces, for pies and tarts and dumplings.

Marya’s heart reeled in surprise. She searched her stomach: Is this magic? Is it chyerti work? But she could not tell. She felt nothing.

“Tatiana!” she cried out. “How is this possible? How can you have come to live here, so far into the wild? How can I have found you, after all that has passed? It is your sister, Masha!” Marya might have wept, but her tears had wrung dry with weariness within her, so long and fast had she flown.

The woman looked up and her face shone, all brown and crimson. She filled like a silk balloon with the sight of her sister. Tucking her knife under one strong arm, she leapt down from her egg and kissed Marya all over her face before turning to Ivan and kissing him, not very chastely at all, on the cheeks. “Marya! Oh, my dearest sister!” she exclaimed. “So much time has passed! Look at you, grown as a goat! Ah! When did we all go blind?” Tatiana tapped her sister’s glasses, tucked into her breast pocket, yet just the same as her own.

Marya longed for Tatiana to rub her head and fuss with her hair as she used to, when they were young together in the house on Gorokhovaya Street.

“Tanya, are you happy? Are you well?”

“Oh, very well! And with my fourth son on the way!” She patted the brown egg fondly. “Marry a bird, wake up in a nest.” She winked. “But then, you always knew he was a bird, didn’t you? And you didn’t tell me. Clever girl. But how goes it with you? Are you happy? Are you well?”

“I am tired,” said Marya Morevna. “Tanya, this is Ivan Nikolayevich. He is not a bird.”

Ivan bowed to Marya’s second-oldest sister.

Tatiana bemusedly pushed her glasses up onto her nose. “Oh, I know who he is. Think lieutenants don’t get around, do you? Gossip is like cups of sugar in these parts. Just look at my sister, a fallen woman, a heartbreaker, and at her age! I’m so proud of you. I’ll have you know I’ve had twice as many lovers as Zuyok since he first took my maidenhead, and I’ve nine sly little chicks to show for it!”

“So many!” Ivan whistled.

Tatiana widened her lively eyes at him. “Haven’t you heard? We’ve cast off the oppressive hierarchies of the old world.” She grinned. “We must all do our parts for modernity.”

“Life is hard enough, I think, without modernity,” Ivan sighed.

“Tfu!” Tatiana spat. “That’s what you know.” But she turned her shapely back to him and embraced Marya Morevna once more. “Of course you must stay the night, refresh your poor horse—what a loyal beast!—eat from my board, drink from my cabinet. You are my sister. What belongs to me belongs to you, even if you are a notorious slattern. We are family; we take after each other!”

And so Tatiana led them to her long walnut table set with roast swan, vereniki stuffed with sweet pork and apples, pickled melons, cakes piled with cream and pastry. At the head of the table sat a man in a fine brown smoking jacket. His head was a thick-feathered plover, and he snapped suggestively at Marya when she pulled out Ivan’s chair. Tatiana swatted his wing and coaxed him away with her, warbling and clicking to him in the bright, squabbling language of the well-matched.

Ivan devoured the sweet pork and gulped deep red wine.

“The vineyards that gave us this wine also provide the wine for Comrade Stalin’s table,” Marya said with a solemn, blank expression. “Someone told me once that even when children starve for the sake of righteousness, Papas always have wine at their table.” She sipped the wine herself. “When I was young, it seemed far too sweet. I savored bitterness, the spice of those who have lived long and wildly. Perhaps you, too, should learn to prefer it. After all, when all else is gone, still you may have it.” Marya Morevna drained the glass. “Now, even this candied syrup tastes bitter to my tongue,” she sighed.

When the dawn pinched the great house’s brown cheeks, Marya and Ivan Nikolayevich found Tatiana once more atop her ribboned egg, slicing apples like a woodsman, too fast to see.

“Masha, my own, my littlest sister,” the plover’s wife called down. “Take this with you.”

She tossed an apple to Marya, its red ball spinning in the air. It was firm and bright as a gem.

“No matter how much you eat, so long as you leave the core, in the morning it will be whole again. I make all my children’s suppers with the stuff, so they will know their mother looks after them, and thinks of the future.” Tatiana climbed down the smooth side of her egg and held out her arms to her sister. When Marya stepped into them, Tatiana stroked her head and fussed with her curls. Marya laughed despite herself, as she always had.

“Tell our mother I love her, when you get to Leningrad,” Tatiana said, and kissed Marya on both cheeks. Tanya smelled like bread and loving, and Marya Morevna held her tight.

Thus they traveled, into the dawn, into the afternoon, across thrice nine kingdoms, the whole of the world between the Country of Life and Leningrad. Through the twilight, and into midnight. The stars wrote strange names onto the dark papers above. Still, no woven soldiers appeared to seize Marya Morevna, or to shoot Ivan Nikolayevich with rough woolen rifles.

Finally, the horse with red ears fell to his knees in a stony pass smeared with ice, where no flower or tree showed itself. A humble hut stood in a circle of sharp rocks, protected on all sides. One of the windows glowed with firelight; horse-breath steamed from one age-blackened barn. A small iron door stood ajar, as though daring, rather than inviting them. Marya’s fingers throbbed with cold. She helped Ivan, who was coughing hoarsely, his skin flushed and fevered, across the threshold.

The single room of the house lay around them, its hard earthen floor dotted with studs of ice, its candles all tallow, thick and long as arms. And in the center of the compact floor sat a great egg, its shining steel shell studded with iron bolts. Atop the egg sat a slim, gentle young woman, her blush quicker than shadows passing. She peered over a pair of glasses at a basket of keys in her lap, and sorted them, the iron from the copper from the brass, for smelting.

Marya’s heart sang in delight. She had hoped, she had hoped, after the others.

“Anna!” she cried out. “How is this possible? How can you have come to hide here, so high in the mountains? It is your sister, Masha!” And Marya wept, her tears warm and free and glad.

The woman looked up, and her face shone, all pale and bright. She filled like a pail of water with the sight of her sister. Tucking a ring of keys under one slender arm, she leapt down from her egg and kissed Marya all over her face before turning to Ivan and kissing him coldly on the cheeks. “Marya! Oh, my dearest sister!” she exclaimed. “So much time has passed! Look at you, grown as a wolf! Ah! When did we grow so serious?”

Marya longed for Anna to seize her up and dance with her, as she used to when they were young together in the house on Gorokhovaya Street.

“Anyushka, are you happy? Are you well?”

“Oh, very well! And with my second daughter on the way!” She patted the steel egg fondly. “A wife and her husband must be in complete agreement.” She winked. “But then, you always knew he was a bird, didn’t you? And you didn’t tell me. Traitorous girl. But what of yourself? Are you happy? Are you well?”

“I am tired,” said Marya Morevna. “Anya, this is Ivan Nikolayevich. He is not a bird.”

Ivan bowed to Marya’s third-oldest sister.

Anna angrily pushed her glasses up onto her nose. “Oh, I know who he is. Think lieutenants do not inform on each other, do you? Gossip is like ration cards in these parts. Just look at my sister, disloyal, a criminal, at her age! I’ll have you know I have lived with virtue since Zhulan took my conscience, and I’ve two upright little chicks to show for it!”

“So few!” Ivan whistled.

Anna slitted her plain eyes at him. “Haven’t you heard? It is wicked to have more than your neighbors possess.” She grinned. “We must all do our parts for the Party.”

“Of course,” said Ivan.

“Tfu!” Anna spat. “That’s what you know, both of you.” But she turned her elegant back to him and embraced Marya Morevna once more. “But you must stay the night, refresh your poor horse—what an earnest beast! But your prisoner looks sick. He would throw up anything you fed him. You are my sister. What belongs to me belongs to you, even if you are an exile. We are family. But you mustn’t tell anyone I harbored you.”

And so Anna led them outside, through the silver ice to a little bathhouse, hardly bigger than one of Olga’s closets. A man in a threadbare grey coat exited the banya with a puff of steam. His head was a lean shrike’s, and he would not look at Marya as he passed her by. Anna smiled at him, her face lighting like an oil lamp, took his wing and walked back towards the house, croaking and cawing to him in the strident, ordered language of the incorruptible.

Marya Morevna refused to let Ivan speak. This time she made her will iron, flexing it, testing it. Ivan submitted to her, and there was gratitude in his submission. You are spoiled, she thought. All that rich food and you have kept it all in your belly, enjoyed every bite. But you are sick now, and must yield. She seated him in the bathhouse. On a little paint-scraped table rested a mug of vodka.

Marya stood very still. She felt as though she were two women: one old and one young; one innocent and one knowing, strange, keen. Marya undressed Ivan Nikolayevich, and her hands seemed to move twice for each motion, to unbutton his shirt now, and to unbutton her own then. His eyes rolled and his red brow sweated. He nearly called out her name, but remembered to be silent, and she kissed him for it. Marya Morevna rubbed his skin with her long, hard fingers. Her golden boy nearly fell asleep sitting up, calmed by her hands and her soft, sad little singing, melodies half-remembered, about biting wolves and uncareful girls. Soon both sweat and tears rolled down Marya’s face, and she wished Koschei were with her to show her how to tend to this sick human, the care of whose body was now inexplicably hers. But gone is gone. There could be no more Koschei. Only Marya remained.

“Drink, Ivanushka.” She clucked gently, like a mother, and put the mug to his lips. “Your lungs want vodka.” Obediently, he drank, and coughed, and drank once more.

Marya Morevna sank his clammy feet in her sister’s shallow tub. She held a handful of water to his nose and ordered him to breathe it in. Ivan spluttered, and gagged, but did it anyway, so accustomed was he now to her voice, her command. Finally, she made him stand. She reached into the foggy corner of the banya, knowing with all of her marrow that a long white birch branch would rest there.

But Ivan had drifted away into his fever, and slept curled on the floor of the banya like a hound.

Marya let go of the birch branch slowly. She watched him in the dark without a sound.

When the dawn roused the humble hut’s household to work, Marya and Ivan Nikolayevich found Anna once more atop her steel egg, sorting keys like an engine, too fast to see.

“Masha, my own, my littlest sister,” the shrike’s wife called down. “Take this with you.”

She tossed a key to Marya, with brass teeth. It glowed dimly in her hand, catching the sun.

“It is the key to our old house, on Gorokhovaya Street. But of course it is Dzerzhinskaya Street now. One of us should still live there. One of us should be young again.” Anna climbed down the grey side of her egg and held out her arms to her sister. When Marya stepped into them, Anna pressed her face to her sister’s breast, took up her hand, and began to dance with her, a gentle, slow circle around the little hut. Marya laughed despite herself, as she always had. She remembered, as if through a glass, having laughed like that, a lifetime ago. She kissed Anna’s forehead with passion.

“When our mother died,” Anna said, “the Housing Ministry sent the keys to me. I was the only one they could find. We keep our registrations current.” Then Anna kissed Marya on both cheeks. She smelled like iron and strength, and Marya Morevna held her tight.