devil chased you through the snow! You’ll be Queen Camel, prize pisser!”
“Marya Morevna, look at me.”
Marya could not help it. She looked down. A beautiful young woman stood below her horse, her blond hair gathered up in an elegant ballerina’s bun. She wore a thick white fur coat, the kind a man gives to his mistress. On her chest glimmered a splattering of light, as though someone had thrown a bucket of molten silver onto her. It glowed like a watery star.
“Svetlana Tikhonovna!” Marya gasped.
“Yes, it is me,” the woman said. “Come down and hug me, my darling. I was one-twelfth your mother, after all.”
Svetlana held out her arms. The star on her breast rippled.
“I’m not supposed to.” But she felt her eyes burning with tears. She had not known how much she wished to see a human face, a motherly face.
“The Marya I know didn’t care much for
“How can you be here, Svetlana? This is the other side of the world.” Marya’s fingers ached to brush her icy cheek, to say,
“So true, so true! Well, the tale of it is, I died a few months after you left. I couldn’t help it, I was so hungry. When the police came to question my husband about his club memberships, I spat at them and told them they ought to be shamed, to be so fat, in their big apartments, while my babies and I didn’t remember what meat tasted like! You can’t say that sort of thing. I knew that. I think I was just tired of being alive. It’s no good, these days, being alive.”
“I like it,” whispered Marya.
“That’s because you don’t live in Leningrad. Can you believe it? It’s Leningrad now that the old dragon is dead. They keep changing the name. Mark me, in twenty years they’ll call it Lemon Popsicle and shoot people who laugh when they say it. Life is nice when there’s cucumber soup and eye powder the color of scallions and a samovar piping away on every table. I forgot how nice, until I came to the Country of Death, where Viy is Tsar and the ghosts of the meals the living eat make all our larders groan. Come down, Masha. I’ll give you a candy.”
“I’m afraid. I don’t want to go back. I don’t want to be hungry. I don’t want to be ordinary and ignored. And I certainly don’t want to be dead. My home is in Buyan, in the Country of Life.”
“Your home is
“I haven’t! But you can leave your home and find someplace new. People do it all the time. Why can’t I?”
Svetlana Tikhonovna shrugged as if it didn’t matter to her in the least. “Come and kiss my cheeks, devotchka, and I will tell you how beautiful you’ve grown up to be. What have the living to fear from the dead?”
Naganya whooped from the far corner of the field, where the woman had stopped, her manacles springing off with a clang. The old grandmother set off at a dead run back to her house, and the vintovnik danced, the shackles jangling in her hand.
Marya shook her head. She felt as if a silver fog clung to her head, making her dull and drowsy. “Svieta, you do not mean to kiss me, really.”
Svetlana Tikhonovna cackled and leapt at her, clawing and grasping at her leg. Folk spiraled up out of the snow like smoke, men and women and children, all with the silver splatter of death on their chests, all hungry and showing their teeth.
“Come down, come down!” they wept. “We only want to love you, and embrace you! You are so warm! Why should our enemy have all your kisses?”
A hundred cold fingers pulled at Marya, and no rider can stay on their horse with such hands on their skin. She toppled and fell into the mass of them, snow and vapor puffing up around her. As one they fell on her, weeping all the while. They did not bite her or claw her, but kissed her, over and over, their lips on her flesh. With every kiss she felt colder and colder, thinner and thinner, as though the night wind might blow her away. Svetlana Tikhonovna lay against her, her full, frosted lips closing over the mouth of Marya Morevna.
“Come down,” the ballerina whispered in her frigid ear. “I will teach you to dance so perfectly as to stop a hundred hearts with every step.”
Marya moaned beneath the shades. She tried to think, to fill her heart with living, hot things, to remember that she was alive and not sunk in the earth under the weight of all these ghosts.
“Tea,” she whispered faintly. “Raspberry jam still in the pot, ovens, soup with dill, pickle broth.” The shades recoiled, their teeth reflecting moonlight, silver and flat. Marya struggled to lift her head. “Peppers on my plate and running in the cold and dumplings boiling in an iron pot and Lebedeva’s powders and Zemya’s curse words and gusli playing as fast as fingers can pluck!” she continued, her voice stronger, lower, almost growling. The ghosts glowered resentfully at her.
Svetlana Tikhonovna grimaced.
“You were always a vicious child,” she spat.
“A firebird in my net! A rifle in my fist! Mustard plasters and birch switches and blini crisping in my pan!” she screamed, and the citizens of Viy’s country threw up their hands, wandering back into the forest.
Marya shakily pulled herself back onto the young horse, who, to his credit, had not spooked or run, but munched on weeds buried in the snow and thought nothing of the whole business. Naganya stood on the other side of his barrel flank, squinting up at Marya.
“Don’t be too pleased with yourself,” she said. “Imagine! You could have just listened to me in the first place—how novel that would have been! A first, in the annals of Buyan!”
Naganya held up her dark hand. In her palm was a flower, its blazing orange petals as thick as cow tongues, covered with bristling white fur, its leaves sharp and shredded, its stem studded with wicked thorns.
“Remember this when you are queen,” said the vintovnik solemnly. “That I went into the dark for you, and scared an old woman half to death.”
Chairman Yaga sat at her monumental desk in the rear of the magicians’ cafe, its wood black and glossy as enamel. She turned over the raskovnik in her hands, peering at it with a jeweler’s glass.
“Well, it’s a runt,” she conceded.
“You didn’t ask for a bouquet,” Marya snapped. Dark circles rimmed her eyes; her fingers had gone pale and bloodless. Every inch of her ached, worn out, run down, exhausted.
“True, true. I’ll remember that, for the next girl.”
Marya said nothing, staring straight ahead, but her cheeks burned.
“What have we said about blushing, devotchka?” Baba Yaga pinched her thick nose. “Goats and gangrene, girl, I can’t stand the smell of your youth!”
“Wait a while. It’ll go away.”
“Oh ho! Now we’re sniping at our betters, are we? Listen, soon-to-be-soup. In marriage, the highest virtue is humility. If you’re humble, they’ll never see you coming!” Baba Yaga slapped the table to emphasize her point. As if by coincidence her fingers found a glass of vodka there, and she knocked it back in a gulp. “Whenever I get married, I always wear a caul ripped off of twin calves. Makes me young, makes me beautiful like a dollop of butter, makes me blush and tug my braids and pray in churches and bow down, humble as manure. The boys can’t resist it! They come panting with their cocks on a silk leash, their balls painted gold for my pleasure. I give them a night on my knees, just like they like, sweet and obedient and dumb as a thumbnail, confused by their mysterious bodies, oh my, so much stronger than mine! Then they wake up and—ha! There is Baba Yaga in their beds, extra warts, teeth like spikes, and the soup pot already red on the hearth. It’s a good trick. You should see their faces!”
“I’m not like that.”
“We’ll see. There is no such thing as a good wife or a good husband. Only ones who bide their time.”
