Free Deathless by Catherynne Valente Page B

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.
Of course, it is just as easy, in this manner, to reach the country of the Tsar of Death. Travel is never without risk.
    Zemlehyed the leshy squinted at the great black book. With one gnarled, mossy hand, he shook it by its corner. A few leaves fell on it from the canopy of birches. Sunlight spilled down through the white branches, cool and golden and crisp. The coal-colored spine of the heavy volume glittered where the waxy autumnal light struck it. Dubiously, the leshy gave the cover a good gnaw. He wrinkled his burl-nose. Zemlehyed looked more or less like what you would get if a particularly stunted and ugly oak tree had fallen passionately in love with a boulder and produced, at great cost to both, a single child. His mistletoe eyebrows waggled.
    “Why she read this none-sense? It’s got no pictures. Also, boring.”
    Naganya the vintovnik rolled her eye. She had only one to roll, since her left eye was less an eye than a rifle scope, jutting out from her skull, made of bone and glassy thumbnail. Nevertheless, she wore half a pair of spectacles over the other eye, for she felt