Catherynne Valente - Deathless

Marya’s eyes blurred with tears. She felt dizzy; another step and she’d topple over the edge of the balcony. All of them? All of them had loved Koschei, slept in his huts? Snuggled with vintovniks? Learned to be cold?

“He said there were no others, not ever. He said I misheard Volchya-Yagoda, and I was his only love.” But more than the lie she had been told, Marya’s heart could not absorb the ugliness of her lover keeping these girls prisoner, year after year, like a treasure hoard.

“Husbands lie, Masha. I should know; I’ve eaten my share. That’s lesson number one. Lesson number two: among the topics about which a husband is most likely to lie are money, drink, black eyes, political affiliation, and women who squatted on his lap before and after your sweet self.”

Marya covered her face in her hands. She could not bear to look at the Yelenas and Vasilisas. To think of them wrapped up in mustard plasters, or opening their mouths to receive bread and roe. And worse, never going home, never looking up from work that could never, never be done.

“Hounds and hearthstones, girl, haven’t you ever heard a story about Koschei? He’s only got the one. Act One, Scene One: pretty girl. Act One, Scene Two: pretty girl gone!”

“I didn’t think it meant anything.” I thought the stories were about me, somehow. That I was a heroine. That the magic was for me. “They don’t even know what writers are, here!”

Baba Yaga softened, as much as she could soften. Her braided eyebrows creased together gently. “Doesn’t mean we don’t know what stories are. Doesn’t mean we don’t walk in them, every second. Chyerti—that’s us, demons and devils, small and big—are compulsive. We obsess. It’s our nature. We turn on a track, around and around; we march in step; we act out the same tales, over and over, the same sets of motions, while time piles up like yarn under a wheel. We like patterns. They’re comforting. Sometimes little things change—a car instead of a house, a girl not named Yelena. But it’s no different, not really. Not ever.” Baba Yaga pressed the back of her withered hand to Marya’s cheek. “That’s how you get deathless, volchitsa. Walk the same tale over and over, until you wear a groove in the world, until even if you vanished, the tale would keep turning, keep playing, like a phonograph, and you’d have to get up again, even with a bullet through your eye, to play your part and say your lines.”

Marya’s tears trickled off her cheeks and dripped through the iron balcony grate. One splashed upon a Vasilisa’s red hair. She did not move, even a little. Oh, I will do something, something, Marya thought with a fury like a fever. When I am Tsaritsa I will break all these machines and I will set them free. “If you’re here to decide if I can marry, why have you waited so long? I’ve been here nearly a year. I’ve believed him for a year!”

Baba Yaga withdrew her hand. Stamping out her cigarillo on the balcony rail, she straightened her back.

“Lenin died,” she said curtly. “He’s better at it than my brother. His death stuck to him. What should I have done? I went to dance on his coffin. I owed him at least that. No one saw me, of course. After all these years, I’m nimble enough to step under the wind. The horns played and the dirges sang and I danced on his ugly glass coffin—like Snow White, the bald devil! I wonder, if I kissed him, would he wake up?”

“I could have an order made up, if you like,” said Chairman Yaga, marching back down Skorohodnaya Road on her own steam. She stopped short, sniffing the air with long, snorting breaths like a hound. Baba Yaga snuck around the side of a darkened, quiet distillery. “Aha! Thought you could hide, did you?” she cried, kicking a massive storage barrel of new vodka. Snow crusted its iron bands. She petted it fondly. “I have a nice brass stamp, big enough to bash heads. But I believe it’s all more or less standard. Three tasks, completed on schedule, and you can put on a nice white dress and blush to your heart’s content. Well, I doubt he’ll let you wear white. But you get the idea. And if you fail, I get to crunch your green bones between my teeth—snick, snick!”

“I thought you punished girls by putting them to work in that factory.”

Baba Yaga tapped at the vodka barrel like a safecracker. “That’s the privilege of a Yelena. You, I want to eat. Family shares alike, you know. My brother gets to taste you. Why should I be left out? You’ve been eating like a tsarevna for a year! Look at those buttocks, those meaty arms! I could get a Lenten feast out of you, and half a New Year roast.”

Marya Morevna stood in the cold, hands shoved deep in her woolen pockets. The wind buffeted her fur hat. “Isn’t it the groom who’s supposed to get firebird feathers and rings from the bottom of the sea to prove his worthiness to the bride?”

Baba Yaga laid her head on its side, as if considering which answer would be most amusing. “Women must cast off the chains of oppression, my little suckling calf. Besides, that sort of thing really only works if you don’t let the groom have his way with your womb for a year before the wedding. Once you do, you can’t get grooms to carry out the hearth-ash, let alone mess about with firebirds. Appalling creatures, if you ask me. Nervous bags of burning excrement—and have you ever seen one eat? You’ll get nothing but blisters and a kick in the mouth for the trouble. And that goes for husbands and firebirds both.”

Marya allowed herself a smug smile. She hadn’t a scratch from her firebird.

“But the Yelenas,” she whispered. “I can’t bear to think of them. There must be a mistake. I have to talk to him. I have to—” Maybe it was all nothing, or the old witch was lying just to upset her, and she would laugh with Koschei about it in the morning.

“What, hear him explain? Grovel? I can understand wanting him to crawl. I’m sure he’s made you do enough of that, and what have you done to deserve it? Had pretty breasts and memorized a bit of poetry? Listen, devotchka. A baba knows. Just tell yourself a story that’ll satisfy you and pretend he told it. Save you a bowlful of trouble.”

“I thought you didn’t want him to marry.”

“I don’t give two teats whether he marries or not. But I won’t tolerate his bringing hang-jaw, lackwit brats into the family.” Chairman Yaga crooked her finger at the oak vat. Her long, warped fingernail sparked as she cut a tiny, neat hole in the side of the thing, then tipped her head to slurp the vodka spurting out. Liquor splashed onto her dry tongue as she lapped and slurped away. Finally, the crone wiped her mouth with her sleeve and traced her finger the other way, sewing up the hole. “And you have to admit, I’ve a devil of a habit for being right. Which of those brats didn’t pounce on the first potato-gobbling cretin that passed her way? Which of them didn’t plot against Koschei? He’s been hurt, my brother, so often. I only want what’s best for him. Tell yourself that, if it helps you smile when he kisses you. And you’d better smile. I’ve been married seventeen times, Marya Morevna. Do you have any idea how much I know about men? And women! Don’t look so shocked—after an eon or two of being a wife you’ll want one of your own, too. Fiendishly convenient things, wives. Better than cows. They’ll love you for beating them, and work ’til they die.”

“I’m not like that.”

“We’ll see. Anyway, what I know about marriage could fill the sky on a starless night. I don’t get to give the tests because I buttered up the right kommissar. I give them because I know. A wife must terrify, she must have a stronger arm than a boyar, and she must know how to rule. That’s all that matters, in the end. Who is to rule. And if you can’t, tscha ! You’ve no business with a ring.”