Catherynne Valente - Deathless

Zemya bent by the riverbank, his huge knees popping loudly in the blue air. He gathered up a mound of earth in his arms, so much earth that great, long bones and boulders came up with it, so much that behind the mass no leshy could be seen, and flung it away from him. It exploded against a hillock in a shower of dust and broken rock. Zemlehyed winked at Marya and hopped into the hole he had made, already filling with river water. He leaned his shoulder against one side of the earthen hole and shoved, the cords of his neck taut as guitar strings. He burst through the soil and kept shoving, so fast and so far that Marya immediately lost sight of him amidst the black dirt and the river rushing to fill up the path he had made for it. By the time he reached the yurt, the river could not be stopped. He leapt up out of the foam and roaring water as the current swept over Comrade Gorinich, carrying him along with it to join another stream farther down the hill. The screeching of Zmey Gorinich echoed in the valley, but so did the laughter of Zemlehyed, who spat after him.

Marya walked back to the place the yurt had occupied, her hair drenched with spray, her scalded face throbbing. When she reached the place the yurt had recently occupied, the river had calmed somewhat, and Zemya was picking through the grass, looking for gold.

“There’s nothing here, Zemya,” sighed Marya. “Not even bones. Look, everywhere there is nothing but cotton plants!”

Marya laid her head on one side. She scrambled over to a clutch of cotton, pale wisps blowing lightly in the hot wind. She snapped off one of the fluffy white heads. She knew it, she knew the riddle, and triumph made her scalp tingle.

“Oh, Zemya! I see it now. Do you see it? White gold. Comrade Gorinich was right to laugh at us, begging for coins.” She turned the blossom over in her hand. “And the black must be—”

“Oil,” finished Zemlehyed.

Marya frowned. “But I have no equipment to fish up oil from the earth. Perhaps there are barrels somewhere. Perhaps there is a drill, in the hills.”

Zemlehyed grinned again, his beard glittering with sweat and river water. He drew up one ponderous arm and, with a yell, brought it crashing down against the earth. It gave way, and the leshy sank into the ground up to his shoulders. His face creased as though he were groping in a barrel for herring. Finally, with a cry of strain, he pulled his fist back up again. It overflowed with black ichor, thick, reeking. Zemya sat down heavily, panting, pollen spinning about his head.

And in the dimming, bleeding light, Marya Morevna knelt at his side, put her hands on his broad cheeks, and kissed the leshy just as the first star came on in the sky. It was a real kiss, a deep one, and she meant it.

When she pulled away, Zemlehyed’s craggy face was wet with tears.

“Remember this when you are queen,” he whispered hoarsely. “I moved the earth and the water for you.”

Chairman Yaga crooked her braided eyebrow at the lump of black muck and the cotton flower on her desk. The magicians’ cafe bustled and buzzed beyond her door. She stuck her finger in the oil and licked it experimentally.

“Low-grade.” She snorted.

Marya said nothing. Yaga would accept it.

“Look at you, all full of yourself, thinking two out of three makes you a somebody! Tscha, you are still nobody . The last is hardest—that’s the rule—and you’ll never pull it off.”

“I will, though.”

“Have you decided that you forgive Koschei his girlfriends, then?”

Marya chewed the inside of her cheek. “It is better,” she said slowly, only realizing she told the truth as she said it, “to store up all one’s advantages before one moves. I will have your blessing in my holster before I say one word to him, Chairman Yaga.”

Yaga lit up a cigarillo, blowing a fat ring at her bookshelf. “I see my extremely expensive games are not a complete waste. And you’re at least a bit interesting now, with that fancy scar to remember me by.” Comrade Gorinich’s burning skin had left its mark under her eye, a diamond-shaped blister that nearly cut her lower lid in half. Even when it healed, she would look as though she were weeping gunpowder, weeping wounds. “But it doesn’t matter. Having a brain like a potato and a sweet little civilized cunt that minds its own business, you’ve no hope of besting my last.”

Chairman Yaga gestured toward the window with her cigarillo. “You see my friend out there?”

Marya looked, expecting the car with chicken legs to be there, hooting at stray cats. But outside, in the thick snow and shadows of the endless winter evening, sat a great marble mortar, red as slaughter, bigger than a horse, its pestle slowly grinding around the bowl.

“Ride him. Take him all the way to the northern borders of Buyan, to the spot where the fern flowers grow. There is a cave there, in the cliffside, and in the cave, a chest. Bring me what you find there. My mortar, he won’t make it easy. But you will learn to master him, break him, make him obey you.” Yaga sighed, blowing smoke. “Or you won’t. I can’t teach you about mastery, kid; you either have it or you don’t. And if you don’t, well, you might as well climb into a stove now—your husband will burn you up to keep himself warm, sooner or later.” Baba Yaga beckoned to Marya and patted her lap. Under her black fur she wore a leather apron like a butcher or a blacksmith.

Marya recoiled. “I don’t want to sit on your lap. I’m not a child.”

“The littlest fly on a lump of goat shit interests me more than what you want.”

Marya grimaced, crossed the room, and sat, gingerly, clenching her jaw, on Chairman Yaga’s lap. The crone cupped her face like her own grandmother.

“If you think my brother is any different, girl, then there’s no help for you. He’ll burn you down like wax if you let him. You’ll think it’s love, while he dines on your heart. And maybe it will be. But he’s so hungry, he’ll eat you all in one sitting, and you’ll be in his belly, and what will you do then? Hear me say it, because I know. I ate all of my husbands. First I ate their love, then their will, then their despair, and then I made pies out of their bodies—and those bodies were so dear to me! But marriage is war, and you do what you must to survive—because only one of you will.”

Marya swallowed hard. “I’m not like that,” she whispered.

“We’ll see. When you’re flying along in a mortar and pestle with the moon screaming in your ear, and you look so much like me no man could tell us apart, we’ll see what you’re like. Only one thing matters, almost-soup: Who is to rule.”

“No,” said Madame Lebedeva, dipping her finger into a pot of powder the color of amber. It matched both her teapot and her tea. With a deft movement she swept it over one eyelid and inspected her work in the tall, iron-rimmed mirror of her vanity. A gauzy white skirt fluttered at her ankles; a severe blouse gathered its lace around her throat, pinned by her cameo. Her snowy hair rippled in smooth finger-curls, drawn up into a cascading mass of feathers and pearls. The image on her cameo also had such curls, such feathers and pearls.

“What do you mean, no ?” said Marya. Her friend’s denial stung—for all her haughtiness, Lebedeva refused her so little.

“I mean I don’t do that sort of thing.”

“What sort of thing?”

Lebedeva sighed and put down her pink cake-icing rouge with the loud smack of metal against enamel.

“What do you think, Masha? The sort of thing where you come to me with some kind of impossible task oddly suited to my particular talents that simply must be completed and Oh, Lebed, darling, help me in my hour of need! I don’t do that. I don’t drink the ocean so you can fetch a ring from the bottom of it, I don’t stay awake for three days to glimpse a snotty little tsarevna traipsing off to who-knows-where, and I certainly don’t mess about with a mortar that never troubled me.”