“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.”
12
Red Compels
“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.”
Madame Lebedeva perused her armory of lipstick and snapped one up decisively, the color of a peony seen through layers of ice.
“What’s eating you? Naganya and Zemlehyed came with me; they helped me. If I fail, Chairman Yaga will have me in her pot.”
“Naganya and Zemlehyed are your companions, Marya.”
Marya warmed a little with embarrassment. She began to feel she had behaved poorly, somehow. “And what are you?”
The pale lady turned incredulously from her mirror. “I am Inna Affanasievna Lebedeva! I am a vila and a magician and I am not your servant, Marya Morevna! What have you done for me except refuse my advances and mock my concerns because they are not your concerns, because you think cosmetics and fashion and society frivolous? What regard have you shown me but to decline my offers of badly needed instruction and allow your other friends to tread on my pride? When have I come to you saying, Masha, help me curse this cattle, help me woo that shepherd for my amusement! I keep to my affairs, which are not your affairs!”
And Marya Morevna knew she had behaved poorly, and was deathly sorry. She could not bear for a beautiful blond girl to speak harshly to her; it pained her in her throat, where a red scarf once lay. “Oh, Lebed! I did not mean to insult you!”
The vila sighed, pinching her cheeks until they got pink and bright. “That is your nature. You may not be a Yelena, but you are a kind of cousin to them. And your sort does not treat my sort well. So no, I will not help you ride the mortar. I certainly don’t wish you eaten, darling; it isn’t that. But I have my pride. Some days, Masha, when I have not made a cikavac and the cafe turns me away at the door; when shepherds shriek and show me the sign of the cross; when Naganya sleeps in your bed and my lover has left me for a bitch rusalka who is only going to drown him, and it serves him right; it’s all I have. And you laugh at me because I try to teach you about lipstick.”
“Well, you must admit, when placed alongside the threat of becoming soup, lipstick is rather silly.”
Madame Lebedeva stared at Marya until Marya felt her cheeks burn and her black blister flare painfully.