Deathless

body, his human face floats beardless and exquisite, his hair bright as coins beneath his crown. All these things you could tell from his egg, if you could but see it.

Once, Alkonost hatched a daughter. He named her Gamayun. Like her father, she saw the future and the past projected onto her eyelids like two film reels running together. Like her father, she preferred to be alone, the company of her own eggs being preferable to that of her extended family. Together, father and daughter chose the meditations and quietude of the sky over the worries of the earth. They knew how it would all come out already, you see.

Once, because it is not possible to possess so many colors and also a hard heart, Alkonost pitied his brother, the Tsar of Life.

“You are so fragile, Brother, and often in despair. At any moment, Death might take you.”

“Tscha!” said the Tsar of Life. “Life is like that.”

Alkonost, his azure tail feathers waving in the wind, embraced his brother with infinite succor and love, which he had learned from the clouds, which they had learned from the sun. His glittering wings opened around the Tsar of Life like the doors of a church, and when Alkonost withdrew his wingspan, they lay together in his nest, which rests so high in the mountains that the air turns to light and the light turns to air. The Tsar of Birds thatched his nest from the braids of firstborn daughters, and its softness knows no equal. Into these ropes of gold and black and red and brown the great bird laid his brother and fed him like a chick, retching his own sweet meals into the mouth of the Tsar of Life.

Much time passed, and secret things only brothers may speak of. And all the while Alkonost tended an egg in secret, holding it beneath the feathers that covered his ankles. The egg began from his pity for the Tsar of Life. It swelled with each passing day. And each day the Tsar of Life cried out in agony, clutching his chest.

“Brother,” he wept, “my heart is being cut in two. I cannot bear it.”

“Tscha!” said the Tsar of Birds. “Life is like that.”

As the egg neared its time, Alkonost could conceal it no further. It shone huge and black in the light that was air and the air that was light, studded with cold, colorless diamonds. Alkonost did not love it, for it bore more of his brother’s countenance than his own. When it hatched, the two brothers peered over the shattered, starry rim of the shell to see what waited inside the thing that they had made together. Once they had seen it, they agreed to seal up the egg again and conceal it beneath their hearts, never to let it be found, to the extent of both their powers. A ptarmigan could not seal up a hatched egg. Alkonost can.

* * *

The voice of the Tsar of Birds is so sweet that should he wish it, anyone hearing him would forget the whole of her life, even her name. Of course, she must wish it. But should Alkonost speak with the smallest kindness, the littlest mercy, the richness of his voice would sweep away any sorrow in any heart, and leave there instead only the perfect world that might have been, if only the world had not invented hearts in the first place. For this reason, some folk stuff their ears with wax. Some seek out the bird of heaven all their days, praying to be drowned in him. Each of these cannot comprehend what drives the other. How can you want to lose yourself, your history, your name? How can you run from the voice of God? But of course, no amount of seeking will find Alkonost, and no amount of hiding will avoid him.

Life is like that.

25 Gross Desertion

At the end of a long, thin road lies the village of Yaichka. Pale gold larch trees close it in as tightly as a wall, and in the autumn, the mist touches the ground only on Sundays. Much rich-smelling smoke from well-made chimneys and aged, crisp wood rises up to the very clear night stars, which look like nails in a strong, black roof. Wolves howl in the forest, but are never seen. Thick, new straw is piled high on every roof; green onion shoots poke out of every kitchen garden. Yaichka possesses several fields whose soil forgives all offenses; four horses; ten head of cattle; two hens and a rooster for every family; three sheep (one pregnant); a solitary goat who has a passion for onion shoots; and a small river, so small it forgot its own name, but which nevertheless allows for Yaichka to possess one mill. A liking for meat keeps these numbers pleasantly accurate. Rain comes only when everyone has shut their doors as tight as they can; snow falls only after each man has chopped all the logs he needs.

No one ever leaves Yaichka—what is out there to want? And no one ever visits from out of town. In the village they have a saying, Yaichka possesses many things, but the forest possesses Yaichka.

Among the other things Yaichka possesses is a short, wide house where Marya Morevna lives with her husband. She has always lived here, and never anywhere else. One other thing Yaichka owns is the secret sight of Marya lying naked in the summer forest, drying her black curls in the sun. On Thursdays and Mondays she briefly touches the ring of iron keys hanging over her hearth, but cannot remember what they might unlock. Then she takes out one of the four horses—her favorite, a dapple grey named Volchya—and gallops into the larch forest so fast her heart flies out ahead of her. With her rifle on her back and her best red scarf knotted around her shoulders, she hunts in the depths of the shadows, crouching, chasing, firing—and on Thursdays and Mondays her peals of laughter are the Yaichka’s church bells. She returns with deer or rabbits, pheasant or goose, sometimes, mysteriously, a wolf flopped over Volchya’s broad back, one of those who howls but is not seen. Marya Morevna shares her meat with her village. No one likes wolf soup much, but they do not complain. Marya does not complain when her hens forget to give her eggs. Life is like that.

Marya Morevna’s husband, Koschei Bessmertny, is so handsome that he could lend a cup of his beauty to every man in Yaichka and still charm the bark from his dogs. Wheat falls into loaves at his feet, but also at the feet of his friends, and all of Yaichka is friends with Koschei Bessmertny. When he bends to pull beets out of the earth, he sings a little song with four lines of five words each, and the last word of the song is wife. When his cow catches pregnant, he offers the calf to the family with the fewest cows, and the milking heifer to the family with the most children. Of the goat he says nothing, and lets him go on his onion-hunting way. Sometimes, in a certain light, he seems to recall to Marya someone she used to know, and could almost remember: a kind of golden cast to his black hair, a way he had of laughing, like a hound baying.

Once, Marya Morevna woke and saw someone working the fields before Yaichka had washed the dreams from its eyes. The someone wore a bright coat of many colors, and cut grain with an enormous pair of shears.

“Who is that?” she asked of her husband.

“Do not look at him, volchitsa,” said the handsome Koschei. “Let him take his share.”

Marya Morevna thought no more of it, kissed both of her husband’s sunburned cheeks, and rode into the wood after two fat beavers with tails like pancakes. When she returned to Koschei Bessmertny in the evening, being held by him was like being held by the sun, and together they relished the pale god of the butter on their bread.

* * *

On Marya’s left-hand side lives Vladimir Ilyich and his wife Nadya Konstantinovna, whose hens have such good memories they never forget an egg. Nadya’s scowl is so severe even winter leaves her well enough alone. Vladimir has gone bald and needs glasses, but he broke his comb over his knee and made his peace with God long ago. Around that time old Vova fell asleep with his new glasses on and was visited by a dream involving an army of red ants and an army of white ants. Somehow this led him to gather together the four Yaichkans who owned horses and devise the system of horse-shares which provides both for Marya’s hunting expeditions and for the equitable tilling of Yaichka’s several fields.

In his youth, a smaller Vladimir encountered a beautiful jackdaw with a red blaze on her chest. The bird snapped savagely at him, and ever since then the boy has possessed a gift for convincing people of strange things. Once, he declared to his neighbors that the tall, beautiful roses that climbed the walls of his house grew unjustly, so that they received both theirs and the lilacs’ share of the rain. The roses were corrupt, he said, and both Aleksandr Fyodorovich and Grigory Yevseevich listened sympathetically over cups of sweet myod. The roses are