Deathless

by Catherynne Valente

  * * *

  Marya had heard no more from the domoviye. But she had very carefully put out her favorite boots, her black ones with fine black ribbon, and tucked a precious biscuit into each. All my fine things belong to the House, which is the same as saying the People. She placed them neatly at the foot of her bed. Besides, I have no place now to wear anything that makes me look like a rich man’s daughter. When she woke in the morning, the shoes were gone.

  In their place was a little teacup with cherries on the handle, glued inexpertly back together. When she picked it up, the handle fell off.

  Each evening, she brushed her hair with Svetlana Tikhonovna’s brush. Her hair rustled dryly, strand against strand, no longer so soft or shining as it had once been, but not yet falling out. Nothing of note happened. Perhaps Zvonok had been making a commentary on the state of Marya’s own ragged, wooden comb. It’s not my fault my hair is so tangled it broke off two of the teeth. She sniffed.

  Marya wanted very much to send a message to the House Below. At night, she whispered into the pipes: I hate it here. Please take me away, let me be something other than Marya, something magical, with a round belly. Frighten me, make me cry, only come back.

  * * *

  Despite Marya’s pleas to the contrary, all twelve of her mothers insisted she visit old Widow Likho after her lessons every day. And take her some nice rolls; she’s old and can’t walk to the bread line.

  * * *

  Marya stood very still in front of her neighbor’s door. Her toes had gone clammy and blue in her threadbare shoes, and her stomach chewed on itself. She wanted to go home. She ought to have gone behind the stove and called out Zvonok or Chainik to go with her. They would not have come—they never answered her tapping. But she would have felt better. She didn’t need a tutor, or looking after. She knew her algebra and her history and could recite two hundred lines of Pushkin from memory.

  Widow Likho opened the door and stared down at Marya like a vulture on a hawthorn branch. Marya half expected her to open her mouth and caw or screech like one. She stood so tall that she could not get through the door without bending down beneath the jamb. Her long hands clutched the sides of the door—she had sharp, pearly fingernails, without a hint of yellow or age. In fact, though her face was wrinkled and withered, her hands were young, firm, certainly able to snatch a girl from the street without trouble.

  Widow Likho said nothing. She turned around and walked slowly down her hall, her black dress trailing behind her like a stain. She pushed aside the curtain that divided her room from the next family’s, and Marya crept in behind her, hoping only to be invisible, for the old witch to take a nap while Marya read until she could politely leave. She laid out yesterday’s bread ration, wrapped in slick brown paper, on a little brass table with cherubs winging its legs. Widow Likho did not touch the food. She merely stared at Marya, inclining her head faintly. She folded her long hands together in her lap—so long the tips of her middle fingers grazed her forearm.

  “My mother said you might like to tutor me, but if you’re tired, I can read to you until evening. Or make you tea, or whatever you like,” Marya stammered nervously.

  Likho curled up her thin pale lips into a smile. It seemed to take some effort.

  “I never sleep,” she said. Marya shuddered. Her voice was deep and rough, like black heels dragged over stone.

  “Well … I suppose that saves time.”

  “Lessons.” Her voice dragged across the room again.

  “You don’t have to.”

  “On the contrary. Lessons are a specialty of mine.” Widow Likho inclined her head in the other direction. “Shall we begin with history?”

  The crone turned, her bones creaking and popping as she did, and pulled a large black book off of the shelf. It was so wide that the edges hung off Widow Likho’s lap, polished and gleaming. She extended it towards 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 visio
n, 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 the stairs, to get splinters in her fingers, to lose her left shoes. Her work at the munitions factory became sloppy, faulty bullets slipping past her on the line, and she was reprimanded twice.

  Marya thought she knew why—but whenever she thought she was brave enough to face the Widow once more, the awful vision of the crone bending over her filled her heart, and her skin went cold. Did everything that had magic have teeth? She had liked the world better when it served up sweet-looking birds and sweet-looking men. Likho was too much; Marya’s mind could not even touch the edges of that blackness. Her body clenched itself and refused to let her act, no matter how tired her mother looked each day. When, just once, all her courage piled itself hand over hand, and she made it so far as the door, the moment her fingers grazed the knob she vomited horribly, her stomach emptying itself of anything good she might have had to eat and wanted to keep.

  Was that magic, or am I just a weak and stupid and cowardly girl? Marya did not know, could not know, and she felt frozen all over with shame as she cleaned her sickness from the carpet.

  And then, in June, Marya’s mother tripped over a crack in the sidewalk and broke her ankle. While she convalesced in the great, tall house (slowly growing greater and taller), the close air gathered in her lungs, and she began to cough up dust, awful, racking sounds in the night. And like a fever, Marya’s fear broke.

  * * *

  “I’m here!” screamed Marya Morevna into Widow Likho’s curiously empty house. No other families greeted her or told her to shut up, for heaven’s sake. “Do you hear me? I’m here! I brought your book! Leave my mother alone!”

  Likho stepped quietly into the hall and turned her head to the side to face Marya without moving the rest of her long black body.

  “I haven’t done a thing to your mother, child. She’s such a nice lady, bringing an old woman tea and sweets in the evening! What a shame her daughter has no manners.”

  “Bad Luck, I know you! It’s your fault she broke her foot, and your fault she’s coughing, and it will be your fault when she loses her job at the factory!” Marya shook—she felt like she might throw up again, but she savagely bit the inside of her lip, willing her body to obey her.

  Likho spread her long white hands. “I am what I am, Marya Morevna. You cannot be angry with a stove for heating the house. That is what it was built for.”

  “Well, I’m here now. Leave her alone.”

  “It’s dear of you to visit your old baba, little one, but there’s no need. It’s too late; the time has passed.”

  “Too late for what? What’s going on? Why do the domoviye know my name? Please tell me!”

  Likho laughed harshly. Her laugh bounced off of the parlor lamp; the bulb shattered.

  “When the world was young, it knew only seven things. And one of these was the length of an hour. Such a pity little Marya doesn’t know it. You had an hour to learn at my knee, and an hour, if I wish it, can be as long as all of spring. But the hour has chimed. He is coming; I am leaving. We try to stay out of each other’s way. Family occasions can be so awkward.”

  Marya’s mind surged ahead of itself. Her cheeks burned. The black book was warm in her arms.

  “You’re the Tsaritsa of the Length of an Hour.”

  “Bad luck relies absolutely on perfect timing.” Likho grinned.

  “Who is coming?” pleaded Marya Morevna. The Tsar from the poem? But that was only a story—but so were domoviye, and yet. She could not put it all together. She was missing vital information, and she hated it. When she knew and others didn’t, that was better. “Tell me!” Marya tried to command the Widow; she tried to bellow and grow taller in her shoes.

  But Likho only shuddered, and folded up her body like a suitcase, and the black of her dress became the black pelt of a tall racing hound, its ribs tucked up into its dark belly. It barked once, so loud Marya clapped her hands over her ears, and then disappeared with a crackling, crushing sou
nd.

  5

  Who Is to Rule

  In a city by the sea, there stood a long, thin house on a long, thin street, and by a long, thin window, Marya Morevna sat and wept in her work clothes, and did not look out into the leafy trees. The winter moon looked in at her, stroking her hair with a silver hand. She was sixteen years of age, with seventeen’s shadow hanging heavy on her every tear. Old enough to work after school, old enough to be tired in her joints and her heels, old enough to know that something irretrievable had passed her by.

  If she had looked out the window, she might have seen a great, hoary old black owl alight on the branch of the oak tree. She might have seen the owl lean perilously forward on his green-black branch and, without taking his gaze from her window, fall hard—thump, bash!—onto the streetside. She would have seen the bird bounce up, and when he righted himself, become a handsome young man in a handsome black coat, his dark hair curly and thick, flecked with silver, his mouth half-smiling, as if anticipating a terribly sweet thing.

  But Marya Morevna saw none of this. She only heard the knock at the great cherrywood door, and rushed to answer it before her mother could wake. She stood there in her factory overalls, her face turned bloodless by moonlight, and the man looked down at her, for he was quite tall. Slowly, without taking his eyes from hers, the man in the black coat knelt before her.

  “I am Comrade Koschei, surnamed Bessmertny,” he said with a low, churning voice, “and I have come for the girl in the window.”

  The house on Dzerzhinskaya Street leaned in and held its breath. In the corners of the chimneys, the domoviye waited to hear what she might say. Marya held hers, too. Her breast filled to bursting, but she could not let her breath go. If she did, what might happen? She wanted several things at once: to run; to cry out; to shrink and crawl away; to throw her arms around him and whisper, At last, at last, I thought you would never come; to beg him to leave her alone; to faint in a ladylike fashion and escape the whole incident. Her heart shook, beating abrupt and hot, all out of time and measure. He took her hand, and she stared down at this man getting snow on his trousers and how big his eyes seemed, how black, how unforgiving, how sly, how old. And yet he was not old. Older than she, but if he were more than twenty she would eat the curtains. He had long, smoky lashes like a girl, and his hair flew about in the wind like the fur of a wild dog. Marya did not often think men beautiful, not in the way she thought the Blodniek sisters were, or hoped that she herself might one day be.