“Not very, compared to Zmey Gorinich!” bellowed the man, his head going red again.
“We did not come to compare ourselves to Zmey Gorinich,” said Marya sweetly, measuring the mood of the man in glasses. He grabbed at a sheaf of paper at the bottom of the pile and yanked expertly, pulling it free without disturbing the rest. He set to scribbling in the file. “How could we compete with three heads, a tail like a mountain range, and the breath to burn empires down?”
The man in glasses looked up exasperatedly. “Look, you criminals, I don’t have three heads. I never had three heads! This is what comes of letting writers have free rein, and not bridling them to the righteous labor of the Party the moment they learn to slap an accusative case around. I am Comrade Gorinich, and I have one head.”
“I am not a criminal,” said Marya Morevna. Zemlehyed did not protest for his own honest status, being a goblin and in spirit a criminal, even if no warrants bore his name.
“Of course you are,” snapped Comrade Gorinich. “Everyone is a criminal! We are beset on all sides by antirevolutionary forces. Naturally, then, humans fall into three categories: the criminal, the not-yet-criminal, and the not-yet-caught.” Comrade Gorinich gestured at them with an enormous fountain pen. “Even the man who is all his life vigilant, who keeps his mind and body so clean that he never has a single antirevolutionary thought—even that man is a criminal! He should have been effortlessly pure! If he had to fight so hard to hew to Comrade Stalin’s vision, then obviously, he was a criminal all along!”
“I thought you were a dragon,” sighed Marya, sitting down in a small chair. She still longed for the best heights of magic, to see dragons and mermaids, to see the naked world. Not this, which made her think only of home, and how her own warrant might at least read runaway. Zemlehyed stood calmly behind her, at attention.
Comrade Gorinich pounded his files with both fists. “I am a dragon! Look around! What do you see, eh? This is my bed of bones! Look how I crunch them!”
Marya quirked her eyebrow, which seemed to enrage him even further. Soon she thought his head would fly right off. She shrugged. “I don’t see any bones.”
“Your criminal nature blinds you! Look!” He snatched up a file in his hand. “Comrade Yevgeny Leonidovich Kryukov! Convicted of anti-Stalinist organization on Tuesday the twenty-fourth! I had him shot on my lunch break! Bones! Comrade Nadezhda Alexandrovna Roginskaya! Convicted of concealing her fugitive, criminal cousins from me! Arrested on Thursday, shot on Friday before dinner! Bones!” He held an enormous file up above his head. “The village of Bandura, in Ukraine! Refused to collectivize! Too bad—either way they starve to death! Bones!” The bald man leaned over his desk, caressing the papers. “Three hundred and sixty-seven separate anti-Bolshevik spies convicted of the murder of Sergei Mironovich Kirov! Or will be, as soon as we can manage to have Kirov shot in Leningrad! Bones! Bones! Bones!” Gorinich clutched the papers in his fists, quite beside himself. “I sleep with my orders of execution stuffed into my mattress. It is good for my back!”
Marya watched him, horror searing through her, sour and cold. “Why do you do this, Comrade Gorinich?” she said softly.
“It is the least I can do! Here, in the hinterlands, the Party does not have it so easy. People are so attached to their yaks and their children. But I, I understand the east. I have been here longer than the dirt! My mother was a great dragon. She lived in Lake Baikal, snorting storms, spitting floods, diving down to the bottom of the lake to bite the floorboards of the world. My father—you will not believe it, I know!—my father was Genghis Khan, and so great a heart had he that alone of all creatures in heaven and earth he was strong enough to force himself on my gargantuan mother, laughing all the while. My egg rode with the Golden Horde. I nursed at the villages they burned, the bodies full of arrows! I am full of easterners! So I know them, toe and pate. And they know me. They know if they go against the Party, they go against Comrade Gorinich, and Gorinich has always been their comrade, their bedmate, their dinner guest, their funeral master.” He adjusted his glasses and mopped his brow with a red kerchief. “I am a conduit. Moscow, she sends me meat and bones, and I send her rich, soft cotton, rich, soft petroleum. Tribute. It’s an old, honorable system.”
“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?”