Like lamps extinguished, Koschei’s eyes darkened. He put her down, less gently than usual.
“I have asked you not to speak, Masha,” he said. His voice was as twisted as a rope. Marya fell silent, abashed.
A simple supper steamed on the table: turnip greens, bread, mashed eggplant, and salted chicken jelly with bits of meat suspended in it. Soft, bland food for her wrung-out body. Marya still could not eat much.
“This is our last night alone, Marya,” said Koschei. “Tomorrow you will be beset with my relations and my serfs and all manner of tasks at hand. I shall miss this, our selfish private hours, secreted away from the collective share. But so it always goes in marriage. Half of matrimony is given over to those with no stake in our bed. I suppose you wonder if your sisters fared so, with their handsome bird husbands; if they grew sick or thrived, if they traveled so far, so fast. All those lieutenants were my brothers, my comrades, and though they did not have so far to go so fast, nor did they travel so well, they too had their moments with borscht and vodka and birch branches. It is a mating dance all birds know. I wish you would have looked out the window, Masha! I was such a lovely owl for you. I fell so hard onto the streetside. So that you would be comforted; so that what you expected would happen just as you wished it to. That is how much I want to please you. But tscha! You missed it! Perhaps if you had seen me that way everything would have happened differently. Perhaps you would have commanded me to be silent. It was a risk I took. I confess it excited me, the possibility of being caught out. But no, I got to keep my secrets after all. A chance passed is a chance passed. Oh, I will be cruel to you, Marya Morevna. It will stop your breath, how cruel I can be. But you understand, don’t you? You are clever enough. I am a demanding creature. I am selfish and cruel and extremely unreasonable. But I am your servant. When you starve I will feed you; when you are sick I will tend you. I crawl at your feet; for before your love, your kisses, I am debased. For you alone I will be weak.”
On her bed by the stove, Marya lay down, her naked back red as a ruby in the firelight. Like a magic trick, Koschei pulled an egg from behind his ear—but not a hen’s egg. A black egg, embossed in silver, studded with cold diamonds. Marya smiled, for her father had done this once when she could not sleep, had rolled an egg along her body to soak up all the nightmares into the yolk and away from her heart.
“You do not understand this yet. Not yet, not yet. You are not ready. You would be rough with my gift. But it is our last night, and I shall soak up all your fears and nightmares and proletariat city-girl terrors. You must have room to fear new things. I shall make you all new, my own revolution, neither red nor white, but black.”
Koschei the Deathless rolled his egg over Marya’s skin. She felt the crackling of the delicate shell against her bones, the jewels scraping her skin.
When he had finished, he pulled her up roughly and crushed her to him, kissing her again. His mouth was cold, and there was no passing of pear jelly or cherries between them. But all the same, Marya Morevna tasted sweetness in his empty kiss.
Suddenly, the sweetness fled and pain forked through her lip—Koschei had bitten her. She stared at him, hurt, raising her hand to her mouth. Her fingers came away bloody. Koschei’s lips were smeared with it. His eyes sparked and glowed.
“When I tell you to do a thing, you must do it. It is not about wanting or not wanting. It is about the will in your jaw, and the egg on your back.”
Marya balked; her vision swam; her lips pulsed hotly where his long, thin teeth had cut her. She felt herself tottering on a needle-tip: If I let him do this to me, what else will I allow?
Anything, anything, anything.
Koschei the Deathless wiped the bright redness from his lips. He looked down at his finger with Marya’s blood upon it. Without taking his eyes from her, he lifted his hand to his mouth and tasted it hesitantly, as if waiting for her to stop him.
Marya Morevna held her breath, and made no sound.
PART 2
Sleep with Fists Closed and Shoot Straight
There is no such thing as death.
Everyone knows that.
It has become tasteless to repeat it.
7
The Country of Life
Where is the country of the Tsar of Life? When the world was young the seven Tsars and Tsaritsas divided it amongst themselves. The Tsar of the Birds chose the air and the clouds and the winds. The Tsaritsa of Salt chose the cities with all their bustle and heedless hurtling. The Tsar of Water chose the seas and lakes, bays and oceans. The Tsaritsa of Night chose all the dark places and the places between, the thresholds, the shadows. The Tsaritsa of the Length of an Hour chose sorrow and misfortune as her territory, so that where anyone suffers, there is her country. This left only the Tsar of Life and the Tsar of Death to argue over what remained. For a time, they were content to quarrel over individual trees, stones, and streams, giving each other great whacks with that scythe which Death wields to cut down all that lives, and that hammer which Life wields, which builds up useful and lovely things such as fences and churches and potato distilleries. However, Life and Death are brothers, and their ambition is precisely equal.
Their rivalry soon encompassed whole towns, rivers (which rightly belonged to neither, but neutrality is no defense), provinces, and beachheads, until the struggle of it consumed the whole of the world. If a town managed a granary of fine brick and half a head of good cabbage to share between them, then Death arrived with white banners like bones, and withered the place with a single stomp. If a village were hollowed out by plague or war, its streets lit by skulls hoisted up on pikes and blood poisoning the well water, then still green shoots would grow wild in the offal-rich gutters, still the last woman standing would grow great in the belly. There could be no agreement between them.
At last, with every inch of earth divided and subdivided, the loam and clay themselves could bear no more. The mountains yielded up their iron and their copper, and the Tsaritsa of Salt slyly taught men her most secret mechanisms, for of all her brothers and sisters, the Tsaritsa of Salt best knew civilized things, things made and not born. Up rose looms and threshers and plows and engines, stoves and syringes and sanitation departments, trains and good shoes. And so the Tsar of Life triumphed, and children upon children were born.
But the Tsar of Death is wily. Soon the looms bit off the fingers of their minders, and smoke clotted breath, and the great engines spat out explosives and helmets and automated rifles as well as shoes. Soon folk of the city requisitioned the grain of the villages, and stored it up in great vaults, and argued over its distribution while it moldered, and wrote long books on the righteousness of this, and Death, iron-shod, copper-crowned, danced.
The rapt pupil will be forgiven for assuming the Tsar of Death to be wicked and the Tsar of Life to be virtuous. Let the truth be told: There is no virtue anywhere. Life is sly and unscrupulous, a blackguard, wolfish, severe. In service to itself, it will commit any offense. So, too, is Death possessed of infinite strategies and a gaunt nature—but also mercy, also grace and tenderness. In his own country, Death can be kind. But of an end to their argument, we shall have none, not ever, until the end of all.
So where is the country of the Tsar of Death? Where is the nation of the Tsar of Life? They are not so easy to find, yet each day you step upon both one hundred times or more. Every portion of earth is infinitely divided between them, to the smallest unit of measure, and smaller yet. Even the specks of soil war with one another. Even the atoms strangle each other in their sleep. To reach the country of the Tsar of Life, which is both impossibly near and hopelessly far, you must not wish to arrive there, but approach it stealthily, sideways. It is best to be ill, in a fever, a delirium. In the riot of sickness, when the threatened flesh rouses itself, all redness and fluid and heat, it is easiest to topple over into the country you seek.