Deathless

Marya.

“Read,” she rumbled. “My voice is what it used to be.”

“Do you mean ‘isn’t what it used to be’?”

Likho smiled again—the same blank, distant smile—as though she had thought of something amusing that happened a hundred years ago.

Marya was grateful not to have to look at her. She opened the massive black book and began to read:

The Causations of the Great War were several. First, the avid student must be aware that when the world was young it knew only seven things: water, life and death, salt, night, birds, and the length of an hour. Each of these things had Tsars or Tsaritsas, and chief among these were the Tsar of Death and the Tsar of Life.

Marya Morevna looked up from the book.

“Comrade Likho, this is not the history of the Great War,” she said uncertainly. “This is not a book approved by my school.”

The widow chuckled, and the sound was a heavy stone falling into a shallow well.

“Read, child.”

Marya’s hands shook on the black book. She had never seen a book so beautiful, so heavy and rich, but it did not seem friendly, like the books in her mother’s room, or in Svetlana Tikhonovna’s or Yelena Grigorievna’s suitcases.

“The world is a slow learner,” Marya Morevna read.

And only after eons did it master the techniques of the sun, earth, sugar, the length of a year, and men. The Tsars or Tsaritsas retreated into mountains and snow. They stayed far from each other out of family respect, but had no interest in these new things, which were surely passing fashions.

But the Tsar of Death and the Tsar of Life greatly feared one another, for Death is surrounded by souls, and is never lonely, and the Tsar of Life had hidden his death away in a place deeper than secrets, and more secret than depth. The Tsaritsa of Salt could not reconcile them, though they were brothers, and the Tsaritsa of Water could not find an ocean wide enough to place between them.

After a space of time longer than it takes the stars to draw breath together, the Tsar of Death was so well loved by his court of souls that he became puffed up and proud. He bedecked himself in onyx, agate, and hematite, and gave bayonets of ice, and cannons of bone, and horses of drifting ash with eyes and nostrils of red sparks to each of the souls that had perished in the long, tawdry history of the world. Together this great army, with shrouds flying like banners and trumpets of twelve swords lashed together marched out across the deep snow and into the lonely kingdom of the Tsar of Life.

Marya swallowed. She felt as though she could not breathe.

“Comrade Likho, the Great War began because Archduke Ferdinand was shot, and the West would have crushed a noble Slavic people to dust underfoot if we had not intervened.”

Likho chewed her cheek. “You are a very clever child,” she said.

“Not really, everyone knows that.”

“If you are so clever that you know everything, why did you call me?”

Marya sat back in her chair. The black book slid perilously forward on her lap, but she did not reach out to catch it.

“Me? I didn’t call you! You’re a widow! You were allocated housing!”

“Your hair is so long and tidy,” sighed Widow Likho, as if Marya had not even spoken. Her breath rattled like bones in a cup. “However did you get it to behave?”

“I … I have a silver brush. It belonged to a ballerina before me.…”

“Yeeeeessss,” the crone said, drawing the word out longer and longer, until its end flapped like a broken rope. “Svetlana Tikhonovna. I remember her. She was so beautiful, you cannot imagine. Her hair was the color of water in winter, and her bones were so delicate! She hardly had any breasts at all. When she danced, men killed themselves, knowing they would never again see such beauty. She had four lovers in Kiev, each richer than the other, but her heart was so cold that she could hold ice in her mouth and it would never melt. We could all have taken lessons from her. And then, one New Year, her second lover, who owned a cosmetics company and a fleet of whaling ships that harvested ambergris for perfumes and lipsticks so red they would leave spots in your vision, made her a present of a silver brush with boar bristles. Who knows where he found it? A peddler woman, maybe, hunched and thin, in a black dress, hauling her cart along a larch-lined road. Svetlana loved the brush; oh, how she loved it! The longer she spent brushing her hair, the more terrible and beautiful she grew. So she let her lover comb her pale hair over and over, and I heard the sound of strand against strand on the other side of the snow. I came to her immediately; I wasted no time for one such as her. And when she performed for the Tsar’s daughters, the ribbons of her shoes were just a little loose—such an infinitely small difference—but she fell, and shattered her heel. Her four lovers left her, since she could no longer dance so that they wished to die. But, ah, bad luck! She was pregnant, and though ice would not melt in her mouth, she hurried to marry the first bricklayer who didn’t care about dancing, and had four children who ruined her beauty. Then her house burned during the purges. Terrible to happen to such a sublime creature, but tscha! Life is like that, isn’t it?”

Marya wanted to run out of the house, but she could not move. Her throat dried up. “Who are you?” she whispered.

“Say my name, daughter. You know who I am.”

“Widow Likho.”

“What is my name, Marya Morevna?” the crone roared, her black voice bending the windows and rattling the books on the shelf.

Marya quailed, shrinking away into the upholstery. “Widow Likho! Comrade Likho! Comrade … oh … oh. Likho. Bad luck.”

The old woman leaned forward. “Yeeeeessss,” she said again, stretching her voice like dark glue. “And you have my brush. You called me to you.”

“No … I didn’t mean to!”

“Intent is trivial,” barked Likho. Suddenly she stood up with a swiftness no young woman could match. She towered; the ceiling forced her to bend at the waist, but beneath it her back was straight, without a hunch. She hovered over Marya, her huge black eyes crackling violet. “But never you fear me, Marya Morevna!” Her voice turned crooning, sibilant, her breath sawing back and forth. She took Marya’s face in her impossibly long hands. “I cannot touch you. You are not for me. Papers have been drawn up in your name, silks and candies allocated. Everyone knows to make way. But you called; I had to come. I am here to educate you, to make you ready. There is no better teacher of rough necessity than bad luck, and you will have great use of me, I promise. Keep your bread. Keep your tears. Neither will help you, and you will work hard to outgrow need of them. Go home. Pat your mother’s hand and kiss your father’s cheek. Drink out of your broken teacup.” Likho grinned. “Don’t forget to brush your lovely black hair. And come to me when the sun is low. Come to me and be my pupil, my pet, my daughter.”

Marya bolted from the room. She ran down the long hallway, bumping her arm against the wall, and out into the long, thin street, panting and crying, her heart hiding behind her ribs.

She still clutched the book to her chest.

* * *

Every evening, while the sun dripped red wax into the Neva, Widow Likho stood outside the house on Dzerzhinskaya Street and looked up at Marya’s window. Her hunch returned—she seemed just a simple old woman again, but she watched the window like a raven with white hair, and smiled unwaveringly, silent, utterly still.

Marya did not read the book. She hid it under her bed. She shut her eyes so tightly her brow ached and recited Pushkin until she fell asleep. And at the rim of her sleep, at the edge of her reciting, there the black name sat, hunched, waiting: There Tsar Koschei, he wastes away, poring over his pale gold.

* * *

Spring became summer in this manner, and Marya’s own mother, not the one who tucked her in on Tuesdays and Thursdays, nor the one who cooked supper on Fridays and Wednesdays, but the one who had carried her for nine months, began to visit Widow Likho, embarrassed that her daughter was so rude and neglectful. Marya begged her not to, but the two women shared tea and sour cherries from their tree every night when Marya’s mother returned from her shift. And, though she had never been clumsy or careless, Marya’s mother began to stumble on