Deathless

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!”