Deathless

“Yes, Marya,” said the voice of the horse, beside her in a moment as though he had always been there, breathing against her shoulder. He glowed milky in the night.

“I wondered, if I wanted you, if you would come.”

“I would not call it a rule. But I have very good ears, and I am fast.”

Marya turned and put her arms around the horse’s long neck. He did not smell of horse, but of exhaust and metal.

“Promise me, Volchya. Promise that you will never take me back to Leningrad. If I do not go back, I cannot die there.”

“Did someone say you were going to die?”

Marya’s brow furrowed. “Well, no, not exactly. He said convicted. But convicted usually means died.”

“Perhaps it will not be so bad.”

“Volchya, you must swear it. What do horses swear on?”

“Nothing.” Volchya spoke with a strange accent, his brassy deep voice pinched and contorted. “Horses are godless. There is only the rider, and the whip. But I promise.”

“Take me home, Volchya.”

The bone-pale horse crouched down and wriggled within Marya’s embrace so that she found herself swept up onto his back before she could breathe twice. She could feel his oily blood churning hot and heavy beneath her. He turned toward the Chernosvyat, a dark blot against the dark sky. In the torchlight, the shadows of his bones moved under his thin skin.

“Why do you let me ride you? Are you more tame than Chairman Yaga’s mortar?”

Volchya-Yagoda snorted. “That thing is a dish. It has no mouth, no teeth. You cannot call something living if it has no mouth. Many things in Buyan are mixed-up and backwards—mossy rocks and guns that speak, birds that turn into men and buildings like youths—but you will notice that everything living has a mouth. Mouths bite and swallow; they talk; they taste. They kiss. A mouth is the main tool for living. The mortar is like a very vicious spaniel. It is alive in some sense, but you wouldn’t set it a place at dinner.” His hoofbeats echoed in the darkness. “As for why I let you ride me, ah, what a terrible science, riding and being ridden! Which is the servant: the one who bears his mistress, or the one who combs and brushes her mount? It is simple, Marya Morevna. You served me when first we met. You polished my skin and gave me new shoes. You slept against my flank. Service buys service. In my four hearts, service is the only possible expression of love. I serve Koschei. But if you had not run your hand along my fetlock, I would never have served you.” Volchya-Yagoda turned his gaunt head to nip at her. It hurt, but she took it as it was meant, gently, with affection. “But that will not work with the mortar, you know. It is a kitchen beast. You could not make yourself so low as to serve it, not if you crawled on your belly. And Yaga’s tests never measure the length of your humility. It wants force, Marya. It wants you to be bigger than it is. It wants a mistress, and it is accustomed to one who is ancient and strong, whose thighs can crush it between them, whose iron hips drive it home. You will never manage it.”

“Everyone is so sure I cannot do it.”

“Oh, Marya, of course you can’t! Even after a year with us you are gentle and kind yet! A little wilder, perhaps, more keen to bite and be bitten, to steal and fight, but how warm you are still. How willing to do as you are told. That is no girl to ride the mortar. You do not have it in you. Come, I will take you to the north wall. You can fetch her bauble, and no one will be wiser.”

Marya shook her head. “She needs only to ask the mortar and I will be caught.”

“I told you, it has no mouth to betray you.”

Marya frowned deeply. She wanted it to be that easy. To be helped along. So much nicer to be helped along. But Madame Lebedeva’s voice sounded in her: Every once in a while, my darling sister, you must do something for yourself.

“The task is not the bauble, it is the mortar,” she sighed finally. “Take me to my tower, Volchya. That’s all. I must find the way myself.”

They rode in silence for a long while. Skorohodnaya Road stretched out like a black ribbon, the great pendant of the moon sliding down its center.

“Volchya-Yagoda, may I ask you a last thing?”

The great horse sighed. “You want answers like oats in a feedbag, Marya.”

“I have spoken with domoviye and leshy and Zmey Gorinich himself, and all of them call themselves loyal; they love the Party like a mother. They recite back to me the slogans of my childhood, and their eyes shine with fierceness. And yet Koschei lives in his great palace and Lebedeva hoards her night creams and her cameos and prizes her patronymic. Little folk scramble to wear badges of belonging on their breasts, to agitate and join up, but big folk live as they always have, like dragons, like Tsars. How can this be?”

Volchya-Yagoda considered. “Is it not so in your world?”

“I suppose. But such things upset people. We hold demonstrations and civil wars when inequities are discovered.”

The stallion snorted, and his breath curled in the cold. “Marya Morevna, we are better at this than you are. We can hold two terrible ideas at once in our hearts. Never have your folk delighted us more, been more like family. For a devil, hypocrisy is a parlor game, like charades. Such fun, and when the evening is done we shall be holding our bellies to keep from dying of laughter.”

* * *

Marya did not light her lamps. Her eyes moved fondly over her red room, turned black by the moon and shadows. She trailed her hands over her things: a brocade chair, the curtained bed all full of silky, bristling furs, her silver writing desk, a firebird’s flaming quill, burning dimly as it slept. Somewhere, a beast missed that feather. Marya regretted suddenly that she had never written anything at that desk, not even a letter home, to her sisters at their marriage-hearths. Not even a poem. Her fingers, hunting and purposeful though her heart drooped hopelessly, found her vanity and its tall mirror, the pots and boxes and brushes Lebedeva had given her on every holiday with calligraphed cards abjuring her to enter the world of grown women and all their secret privileges.

Marya Morevna sat at her mirror, as lightly as in dreams. Her hands fluttered over the array of cosmetics as though they played a harpsichord. The pots brimmed with colors that made her heart swim, creamy, untouched swirls of oxblood and peacock indigo and a pink like a kitten’s paw.

I shall be red as slaughter, as the stone of the mortar, she thought. She collected her memories of Lebedeva’s toilet like cards in her heart: how she had done it, the strokes of her pale hands, the order in which the vila had painted her face. First the powder, like snow, swept over her cheeks and brow with a heavy puff of ram fleece. Then to line her eyes. Marya chose a tiny carved pot of gold pigment, like an icon, a saint’s eyes. Each of her lashes she lined in silver, the wetness of it cool and slippery on her skin. Then she took up a thin boar’s-hair brush and dipped it in crimson, carnelian dust. Under her brow bone she drew a long red line, and over her lids she drew a darker scarlet still, like the blood that pools at the bottom of a heart. Red compels. She pinched her cheeks and rubbed a shiny ruby-bronze cream into them. The lips came last—the mouth that Volchya-Yagoda said was the tool of the living. She found among the forest of lipsticks a fearful autumnal shade, like fire, like dying leaves.

Marya looked at herself in the glass, still herself but girded, made more terrible, older. She had not managed it all flawlessly, as Lebedeva would have done. Her face was a little wild, a little ragged, the lines around her eyes wobbling, the colors too bright, unblended, unsubtle, as if an old woman’s weak eyes and shaking fingers had drawn them. Marya raised up her hands and folded her long black hair into a savagely tight chignon, so tight the pins that held it drew tiny drops of blood from her scalp. In the night, with the moon so high and quiet all around her, she knew the rest like a poem recited. Laughing with Naganya in the sunlight, she could never have thought of it. But the night, close around and heavy, guided her steps, her choices. She went to her closet and drew out a leather apron she’d gotten in summer, when Zemya had decided her arms were too skinny and taught her to beat out fireplace pokers from bubbling iron. It was so heavy, its straps weighting her down, digging into her neck, her waist. Oh, I will be sorry, she thought as she pulled on her thickest, blackest fur and closed it over the apron. Into her pockets she gathered the dry duck bones of last night’s supper, still resting on their ivory tray. Onto her throat went a daub of resinous myrrh and a splash of vodka from a crystal bottle.

Marya Morevna did not want to look in her mirror again. She feared what waited in the glass. But she crept up on herself, and dragged up her eyes to see. How broad her chest, suddenly; how dark and squared her shoulders. How the fur brushed her pale chin; how severe her hair and dark lips looked!