Catherynne Valente - Deathless

“What do you care if the Party has interests in the east?” Marya said, remaining as calm as she could, for calmness seemed to upset him, and the upset beast is careless. “I am only curious. It seems to me, in the old days, Gorinich did not work for the Tsars.”

“Pah! Why should I? I am a Khan by birthright! The Tsars could offer me nothing I did not have. Dilettantes, the whole painted lot of them. But now! The Party deals in bulk, in industrial quantities . They are like me. Gluttons. They hoard. The Party lines my bed with luxurious femurs, sternums, ribs! Without the Party to tell folk it’s all for their own good, I wouldn’t sleep half so well.”

Comrade Gorinich suddenly clapped one hand over his eye and stretched his neck toward them like a turtle.

“What did you say your name was, criminal girl?” he said sharply.

“Marya Morevna.” Runaway, she thought. That’s all he can say against me. And occasionally rough with her friends, but only because they let her.

Gorinich riffled through his papers, lifting files, his tongue flicking in and out of his mouth. “What have we here?” he cried triumphantly. “I knew it, I did! What do I forget? Nothing and no one! Comrade Marya Morevna! Convicted of gross desertion at Leningrad in 1942! Bones! Bones! And that makes you my bones, and that makes you my tribute. What say I shoot you now and get it over with? Why wait? Time is communal, Marya Morevna, the most purely communal of all commodities. It belongs to us all equally. So why hoard it?”

Marya squared her shoulders and laid one ankle over her knee. She could not, could never show a dragon, even one in glasses, that he had frightened her. If it spooks a horse, it will spook a snake. A Khan respects only strength. Even so, she wanted to be back in her red room, warm, with supper ready.

She leveled a stare at him. “If it belongs to us all equally, then I will take and enjoy my share, thank you.”

“Feh.” Gorinich snorted, dropping the black file back onto his desk. He scribbled in it. “Then you eat up my day and shit out only more paperwork. Now I must note that you were here, that you declined to be shot, that you breathed a cup of air, that you disturbed a tablespoon of dust. You left skin flakes and three strands of hair in exchange. I’m really very busy.”

“If you will give us what we’ve come for, we will happily go,” said Zemlehyed simply.

“And what is that?”

“Your gold,” said Marya. “I don’t think I need much. A coin. One white, one black.”

Comrade Gorinich leaned back in his chair, folding huge, meaty red hands behind his bald head. “You, my young criminal, are an idiot.”

Zemlehyed took off his officer’s cap and cradled it in his muscled, oak-root arms. His wild black hair stuck out in licks and corkscrews. “Gorinchik.” He grinned. “Say no. I would love you to say no.”

“I don’t say no. I don’t say yes. I say you’re an idiot with balls for brains, you hulking leshy rock. Oh, I can see the moss on your bones! Who fools Zmey Gorinich? Nothing and no one! What do you think you’re doing out here? You and me, boy, we can dress ourselves up as men, we can conjugate all our verbs perfectly, and they still won’t love us. She’ll never want you smearing her tits with mud and shooting wet leaves into her. My father was more like us than any human since, and he had it right: Take them if you want them, keep the children, and eat your fill of the world. The best humans will ever give us is tribute. You ask your Koschei. He knows better than anyone. It’s them who’ve no souls and no hearts. Who makes Zmey Gorinich’s bed? Not him!”

“I have a soul,” said Marya Morevna, and the golden faces of the Yelenas crowded her mind. “I have a heart. I don’t sleep on anyone’s bones.”

Comrade Gorinich leered. “You’re young yet. Give it time.”

“You were slurping bones clean long before the Party wrote them down for you,” Marya snapped. “Don’t you go drawing lines between chyerti and humans. You are hungry; we are hungry. What’s the difference?”

“The difference is, the whole world is yours, but you keep pushing us out! It’s not enough to have the cities and the churches, have to have the farms, too. Not enough to have the farms, have to have the forests. Not enough to have the forests, have to have the snow, every flake, every crystal! And now you come demanding my gold, too, as if you have the first idea what a dragon’s treasure is, what it means. Well, I have you beat, Marya Morevna. You are already dead. But me? Zmey Gorinich survives everything. I can be a Mongol if I must. I can be Chinese, if that’s the thing to be. And I can be a good Party man without breaking a sweat. At the end of it all, come looking, and still you’ll find Gorinich swimming the ashes, sunning his belly on your skulls!”

Zemlehyed put his cap back on and straightened it. Then, he walked quietly out the door, letting the goatskin flap fall behind him.

“What is he doing?”

“Go find out for yourself,” said Marya, though she had no idea.

“I can’t, imbecile. What, you think a dragon can turn into a man? I’m too big for that! A man’s flesh is no more than a sock to me. You are so deep in my coils I can already taste you. That chair you sit in, that is also me. This desk is me, this floor, this yurt. Even a few of the flowers outside. My scales, my tongue, my crest, my stomach. I can’t walk outside myself.”

Comrade Gorinich took off his glasses and folded them delicately. He opened his mouth horribly wide, all his flat teeth showing. Wider and wider his mouth gaped, until it fell back over his skull like a hood. Marya bolted for the door, but the air around her swelled and darkened, coils she could not see before shimmering into sight around her, as high as walls and higher, squeezing around her, vising her in. Marya tried to beat against the lizard flesh closing her up, but the coils had pinned her arms already. They reeked of rotting flesh and old marrow. She gulped for breath, her chest shallow and frantic, her head only just protruding from a nest of serpent loops the color of underground caverns, black and blue and silver. She could not see the face of Zmey Gorinich, if he had one, only his inexorably tightening body. Even Marya’s tears were strangled away.

“Comrade Gorinich,” she whispered hoarsely, her voice squeezed away, her heartbeat jangling in her ears. “You will have me, soon enough. Your file said so, and files do not lie. You will have me for your bed of bones, and sleep on me forever. But your file does not say Comrade Marya Morevna, eaten by a Kazakh dragon in 1926! There will be discrepancies, Zmey Gorinich! And paperwork! Let me go. You will not have to wait long.” Then Marya Morevna shut her eyes. She leaned as far forward as she could, and kissed, very gently, the snake-flesh closing around her face.

The coils flushed scalding hot, and Marya truly thought for a moment that she might die there. A tiny flame went up on her cheek, just below her eye. Her lashes began to sizzle—and then the coils were gone. She stood in a cotton field outside the yurt, bent double, chasing her breath. Marya slapped her face to put out the flame.

“Masha!” cried Zemlehyed, farther up the meadow, at the riverbank. “Are you all right?”

“She’s bitter and not worth eating!” bellowed a voice from within the yurt.

Marya ran to the leshy, who had taken off his olive jacket and was sweating in his undershirt.

“Where did you go, Zemya? He might have choked me. He might have killed me.”

Zemlehyed wiped his forehead with one massive fist. “I am diverting this river, Marya Morevna. I am coaxing it to run into that horrid yurt, and wash him away. When he is gone, we shall be able to rifle through the wreckage for coins, white ones and black ones. It was his babbling about the Khans that gave me the idea. We did this sort of thing when they were underfoot.”