Madame Lebedeva sighed. “What happens to anything beautiful? Viy ate it up. First the great fish went belly up, one by one, their stomachs practically islands themselves. Then the water turned black and green, with mud currents all through it. Then the waves caught fire, and burned down to the seabed. The flames seared the stars—and then it was gone. Vapor and steam. All the whole of it, gone down into the coffers of the Tsar of Death. You can bet that in his country, there’s a ghost-sea full of ghost-fish still singing their songs, in a different key, with different words. And in our country, if you walk far enough out onto the plain, you’ll see great bones sticking out of the earth where the seabed used to be. Mountains lined with rib bones, valleys full of jaws.”
Marya rode in silence. Each time she learned something of the long history of Koschei’s country and the war with the Tsar of Death, she loved Buyan a little more fiercely, and feared the war a little more sharply.
“Shall we go mushroom picking tonight?” said Naganya softly, still abashed and thrilled by her punishment. “There’ll be a moon out, big as a bull’s-eye. And I’ve a belly for chanterelles.”
The motley party passed through the city gate, a palisade of tangled, towering antlers, each prong crowned with a grinning skull. Marya no longer thought it grisly or shuddered as she passed beneath the empty eye sockets. Now, the skulls seemed to smile at her, to say, We who were once living can guard you still, and love you, and keep you living safe and whole. Nothing ever truly dies.
Once the gates had shut behind them, shops and houses beamed within, their windows lit with red, happy fires. The Chernosvyat sprawled ahead, its black towers and red doors glinting. It looked so like the Kremlin that Marya had often thought the two must be brothers, separated at birth and set apart, one on either side of the world. Koschei lived in the biggest tower, its cupola drenched in garnets. But most folk lived somewhere in the Chernosvyat, in the smaller citadels and chapels and anterooms. The place grew by years, like a tree, like the house on Gorokhovaya Street—on Dzerzhinskaya Street. The old names swirled in Marya’s mind, flowing together and apart again until she could not remember which had come first.
The broad plain hosted many other houses and halls and hearths and hostelries rippling out from the black Kremlin like water. Marya hardly noticed anymore that the houses and halls had been patched together from the skins of many exotic and familiar beasts, their roofs thatched with long, waving hair, their eaves lined with golden braids. Fountains spurted hot, scarlet blood into glass pools, trickling pleasantly in the late afternoon light. A rich steam floated from their basins, and the occasional raven alighted to sip. Once Marya had screamed when a bloody fountain geysered up in its noontime display. Once she had felt sick when she saw the wall of a chapel prickle up in a sudden wind, just like skin. But the fountain had been much embarrassed, and she had been introduced to the chapel, whose name was Avdotia, and these things now seemed only right and lovely to Marya, just living things in the Country of Life, where even a fountain breathed and fl
owed with vital stuff. That was so long ago now, anyway, like the dream of another life.
“I think I am too tired for mushrooms, Nasha,” she said finally. “I will go to Koschei instead, and see if he has need of me. But,” she added magnanimously, “you may sleep with me tonight if you like, and have a tart with icing.” Did she enjoy punishing or rewarding more? Marya could not say. Everything in Buyan had a different pleasure to it, if only one learned how to find it.
The vintovnik brightened and danced a little down the long cobbled road. Zemlehyed grunted and punched the ground with his mossy fist.
“Cronyism!” he spat.
8
Sleep by Me
In the deepest, most hidden room of the Chernosvyat, whose ossified cupolas shone here and there with silver bubbles and steel cruciforms, Koschei the Deathless sat on his throne of onyx and bone. His eyes drooped, redly exhausted, from weeping or working or both. Before him, on a great table formed from the pelvic dish of some impossibly huge fish, lay scattered maps and plans and letters, papers and couriers’ boxes, photographs and sketches, books wedged open, upside down, splitting their spines.
Marya Morevna entered, her hunting costume half-open in the heat of the place. The dark walls of the Chernosvyat often seemed to breathe, and their breath came either brutally hot or mercilessly cold. Marya never knew which to expect. Silently, she walked around the long table and let a single golden feather drop. It drifted lazily down to rest on a requisition form. It no longer flamed, but glowed with a soft amber light.
“I would have preferred it living, volchitsa,” said Koschei, without looking up.
Marya shrugged. “It only died just now, as much of exhaustion from the hunt as the bullet.”
Koschei rose from his papers and drew her to him, bending to kiss her collarbone.
“I am proud of you, of course, beloved, baleful. But you must realize that you have only added a firebird to Viy’s cavalry. A black, flameless thing, its bony wings bearing ghost-pilots with their arms full of ordnance.”
Marya Morevna shut her eyes, savoring his lips on her skin as she savored the slab of black bread, buttered and spread with roe, once, long ago.
“It was hiding a clutch of eggs,” she breathed as he gripped her hair and tilted her head to show her throat, pale and bare. “In a short while we shall have enough firebirds to pull a siege tower, and still have one or two left over to light the hearth when we return.” His weight against her chilled and wakened her skin. She smiled against his dark glove. “Besides, it was tradition, once, for a suitor to fetch a firebird’s feather to show their good and marriageable qualities.”
“I know your qualities.”
Marya said nothing. She did not feel an urgency to marry, exactly—nothing like her sisters, who had longed for it like the prize at the end of a long and difficult game. But she did feel that as long as Koschei kissed her and kissed her and did not marry her, she remained a child in Buyan—a cosseted tsarevna, but not a Tsaritsa, not a native. A human toy. She did not care whether he gave her a ring—he had given her dozens, of every dark and glinting gem—but she did not wish to be a princess forever.
Koschei picked up the knife he had been using to open couriers’ seals and looked up at her speculatively. Reaching up, he slowly sliced off the buttons of her hunting dress.
“If you keep cutting at me I shall have no clothes left,” said Marya Morevna. The gems in her hair clattered against one another as he cupped her skull in one large hand. With the other, he cut away the skirt of her dress in a stroke, like peeling the skin off a red, red apple. His hands burned coldly on her. She felt, as she could always feel, the bones of him beneath the skin of his fingers, his hips. Then he hardened, his skin becoming warm and real and full. A skeleton, always, embraced her first, and then remembered to be a man. She understood—had he not told her? To be Deathless is to treat with death in every moment. To stave death is not involuntary, like breathing, but a constant tension, like balancing a glass on the head. And each day the Tsar of Life fought in his own body to keep death down like a chastened dog.
Koschei dug his nails into the small of Marya’s naked back; blood welled in tiny drops. Marya cried out a little, her breath thin and quick, and he lifted his thumb to his lips, suckling at the little smear of her blood. His cheeks, always gaunt, hung with shadows, and he watched her with a starveling’s eyes. But that did not frighten her anymore. Her lover often looked starved, hounded. She could kiss those things from him, and often did, until his face waxed seraphic, soft, smooth—as anyone can do for her mate when the day is long and hard, and solace far off. She thought nothing of it now, of kissing him alive. Everything in this place was livid and lurid and living, and when he loved her and hurt her all at once she lived, too, higher and harder than she had thought she could. Yes, she thought, magic is like that, when it comes. Like the fountains of blood, the houses of skin and hair, Koschei had long since become home. So Marya smiled as he bit her shoulders, feeling infant bruises bloom invisibly under her skin. Tomorrow I shall wear them like medals, she thought as he lifted her up onto the wreckage of field maps and mechanical diagrams.
“Koschei,” she whispered against his neck, where his dark hair curled. “Where do you keep your death?”
Koschei the Deathless lifted the calves of Marya Morevna around his waist and sank into her with the weight of years. He moaned against her breast. It stopped her breath, how like a child the Tsar of Life became when he needed her. The power she had over him, that he gave her. Who is to rule, that is all.
“Tell me,” she whispered. She wanted that, too. She wanted so much these days, everything she touched.
“Hush, you Delilah!” He thrust against her, the bones of his hips stabbing at her soft belly.
“I keep nothing from you. I befriend your friends; I eat as you eat; I teach you the dialectic! If you will not take me to wife, at least take me into confidence.”