Catherynne Valente - Deathless

“You know me, eh?” The Gamayun grinned. “Good. I know people in high places, see. I have assurances from the government. If Christ returned on a golden cloud, they’d arrest him on the spot, but me they leave alone. Revolutions can only go so far.”

Ivan’s palms stuck together in his fists, clammy, cold. How could he put this in his daily report? “Who is in that tent, Gamayun?”

“Go in and find out. You will eventually anyway. It can’t unhappen before it happens. And then it will all start, like an engine, going and going ’til there’s nothing left to burn.”

“I don’t understand,” he whispered.

The Gamayun waddled toward him, her head bobbing over her massive wing-shoulders. She crouched on the belly of a dead soldier, her weight cracking ribs, her claws gripping clumps of his wine-colored shirt. “Sit down, Ivan Nikolayevich. I am going to tell you everything that will ever happen to you. Come on, then, find your knees—there you are, that’s how they bend.” The Gamayun’s beautiful face peered out of the wreckage of her bird’s body. Her neck stretched out long and sinuously, like a swan’s, but thick, ropy with sinew.

Ivan sat down in the grass, carefully avoiding offense to some poor dead creature.

“Why would you do such a terrible thing?” Ivan asked.

“Because I have to make sure things happen the way they happen.”

“But they must, mustn’t they?”

The Gamayun laid her head to one side. Her eyes shone. “Oh, Ivanushka, not by themselves, they don’t. Think of when your mother told you stories by the stove. You had heard those stories a hundred times. Jack always climbed the beanstalk. Dobrynya Nikitich always went to the Saracen Mountains. Finist the Falcon always married the merchant’s daughter. You knew how they ended. But you still wanted to hear your mother tell them, with her gentle voice and her fearful imitation of a growling wolf. If she told them differently, they would not happen the way they have already happened. But still, she must tell them for the story to continue. For it to happen the way it always happens. It is like that with me. I know all the stories. The boyars always shave their beards. The Church always splits. Ukraine always withers in a poison wind. But I still want to hear the world tell them the way only it can tell them. I want to quiver when the world imitates a wolf. It still has to happen for it to happen. You have already gone into that tent. You have already made off with her. You have already lost her. You could tell your tale differently this time, I suppose. But you won’t. Your name will always be Ivan Nikolayevich. You will always go into that tent. You will see her scar, below her eye, and wonder where she got it. You will always be amazed at how one woman can have so much black hair. You will always fall in love, and it will always be like having your throat cut, just that fast. You will always run away with her. You will always lose her. You will always be a fool. You will always be dead, in a city of ice, snow falling into your ear. You have already done all of this and will do it again. I am only here to make sure it happens.”

“You frighten me.” And indeed, he was shaking, all over, every cell vibrating with the presence of the Gamayun, with the pressure of her words, so heavy, like a storm coming that he could feel in his knees, in his chest.

“Yes,” she said simply.

“I don’t understand. I want to understand.”

“You will. Before the end. You will. You always do.”

“Then why do things happen the way they happen? If I understand it I can change it. Is it your fault? Do you stop me from changing it?” The Gamayun had to tell the truth. Ivan knew that; he remembered it from every tale. And so he could not find any part of himself with the capability to disbelieve her.

“They happen because Life consumes everything and Death never sleeps, and between them the world moves. Winter becomes spring. And every once in a while, they act out a strange, sad little pantomime, just to see if anyone has won yet. If the world still moves as it used to.” The Gamayun ruffled her ragged feathers and glanced up at Ivan under her eyelashes. “Like a passion play. Like a sacrifice. It is certainly not my fault.”

Ivan looked towards the black tent. “I could run home, back to my camp. I could resume my watch and say nothing, ever, of this.”

The Gamayun arched one perfect eyebrow. “Go, then, Ivanushka. Run. Believe me, she isn’t worth it.”

Clouds riffled through Ivan Nikolayevich’s hair. He frowned and thought of how much he had loved the cigarette of this morning. Of his dog’s luck. If he ran, he would still die, sometime. It was 1939. People died all the time. He would still die, but he would die not knowing who was in the black tent. He would wonder about it constantly, like a cut on the inside of his mouth he could never stop worrying with his tongue. Whenever he died, wherever he died, it would be the last thing he thought of: the flapping of the black silk, and how it sounded like whispering.

Ivan had not moved.

“Dobrynya Nikitich always goes to the Saracen Mountains,” said the Gamayun softly. Then she tucked her head under her shoulders and disappeared between two blinks.

Marya Morevna bent over her desk, her hair bound up in a braid around her head, her marshal’s uniform mud-stiff.

The war is going badly.

The war is always going badly.

She passed a hand over her eyes. A year and more now, that she had needed glasses. Look, those glasses said from her desk. Look how much you are not like the others. You grow older and your eyes wear out. In case you could ever mistake yourself for belonging. Marya supposed this was why no one asked after stolen fairy tale girls. What embarrassments they turn out to be. They grow tempers; they join the army; they need glasses. Who wants them?

Marya tapped her silver telegraph. Telephones did not agree with her countrymen. She did not know why and neither did they, but their noses bled when they tried to speak into the receivers. Their ears, too, but not so much. Tap-tap-tick-tap. It is over. No one is left. I am coming home.

She felt a man in her tent suddenly, like a bolt sliding into place. The warmth of him beat against her back, golden, innocent. He smelled like cigarettes and hot bread and male skin. She had gotten good at smelling as everything wore on; she smelled as a wolf smells, now. Marya Morevna did not turn to look at him, but she knew him, how big he seemed in the tent, big as the whole sun. Not now, oh, not now. She almost threw up—and that was how she knew how far she had gone. Once, magic made her feel hot and sick all at once. Now humans did it, twisting her stomach until she longed to rip it out and have done with her whole body.

“I assume,” she said, her throat thick, “your name is Ivan Nikolayevich.” She wanted to accuse him, to have him arrested and brought up on charges of being Ivan, to see him hung for it. How often had Koschei and Yaga told her this day would come, warned of it like a cholera outbreak in the next village, extolled its inevitability. How she had always laughed.

“Yes.” And she heard his voice for the first time, soft and deep as summer mud. She heard as a wolf hears.

“And naturally, you are the youngest of three sons.”

“I … I am.”

“And you are the honest one? Your older brothers, they are wicked and false, and your poor father could never tell the difference?” Marya tasted the bitterness in her voice, like a tannic tea brewed from everything unfair, puckering her mouth.

“My brothers died. In Ukraine, in the famine. I could not say if they would have grown up to be wicked or false.”