Rusalka

CHAPTER 18

SASHA OPENED his eyes with a sudden feeling of alarm, the deck lit by dawn-glow and immediately near him, Pyetr’s blanket lying there—

“Pyetr!” He scrambled up with a foreboding of what had happened the day before, of Pyetr gone from the boat—dead, perhaps…

But Pyetr was lying just beyond the circle of salt, one leg bent under him, his arms in no natural posture of sleep.

Sasha reached him in two strides. He got an arm under Pyetr’s head, appalled by Pyetr’s deathly pallor and the feel of him—he was breathing, but he was ice cold and totally limp. Sasha let him gently down and ran back for the blankets and the jug of vodka, tucked the blankets about him and shook at him violently.

Pyetr’s eyes came half-open, wandered and fluttered with a dawning concern.

“Are you all right?” Sasha asked.

Pyetr made some confused answer, tried to get his arm under him and his leg straightened from its awkward position, and came up at least as far as sitting, with a blind and frightened look on his face.

“What happened?” Sasha asked, holding to his shoulder. “Pyetr?”

Pyetr raked his hand through his hair and propped his arm against his knees. “God,” he muttered. “She—”

“What she’?” Sasha had a dreadful premonition what “she” Pyetr meant, and shook him hard to keep him awake. “Eveshka? Pyetr, was it Eveshka?”

Pyetr nodded, rested his head against his arm and stayed that way, as if sitting up and breathing was all he had in him at the moment.

Sasha grabbed up the blankets and put them around Pyetr’s shoulders. He hesitated to leave Pyetr even for a moment, considering the water and the woods on either hand and the nature of the danger, but he hurried across to the deckhouse and brought out the stove, brought wood and the firepot and with trembling, mistake-ridden efforts got a fire started in the pan, enough to warm Pyetr’s immediate vicinity and make a strong cup of tea. Meanwhile he gave Pyetr a small drink of vodka, and Pyetr’s hands when he touched them were still like ice.

“What did she do?” Sasha asked, steadying the cup on its way to Pyetr’s mouth.

Pyetr took a sip, shook his head, and gave up the cup then to hold the quilts about him. He suddenly began to shiver, bent double and very evidently not wanting to talk about the matter.

But: “Where’s master Uulamets?” Sasha persisted. “Pyetr, for the god’s sake he’s in trouble! Talk to me! Tell me what you know! Did she say where he was?”

“I don’t know,” Pyetr said, between rattling teeth. “I don’t know. She’s lost him—”

“Did she say that?”

Pyetr shook his head and rested it against his arm.

Sasha built the fire as high as the stove and the deck would bear, applied all his intention to Pyetr’s warmth and well-being until he actually felt dizzy himself, while with another trip to the deckhouse for the honey, he made him a cup of hot, sweetened tea.

Pyetr drank it slowly, warming his hands with it, and that seemed to Sasha to have helped most of everything he had done. “I’m sorry,” Pyetr said, when he had drunk it down to half. “I don’t know why we’re alive this morning.” He felt the back of his head and grimaced. “Fell on my head, by the feel of it. I must have walked—”

“Was she alone?”

“I think so. I can’t remember. I just can’t remember. I’m sorry. Small help I was.”

“It’s not your fault. Pyetr, did she say anything?”

“She was a ghost again.” Pyetr looked as if he had just realized he had not said that. “She wasn’t threatening, she didn’t feel—angry: she was worried. Upset. God, I don’t know… I don’t know, it’s just—like she was before, lost and trying to get back and she can’t. I can’t say why and don’t look at me like that!”

Sasha shook his head. It was hard for Pyetr to talk in terms of feeling things were so. Pyetr wanted to touch and handle things before he believed them. “I’m not,” Sasha said. “I just wish I’d been awake.”

“I wish I’d woke you. God, I don’t know what’s happening—”

Sasha grabbed Pyetr’s arm and held it hard to bring him back, because Pyetr was having trouble being aware of things, and Pyetr halfway did know what was happening to him—that was the terrible part.

“Listen,” Sasha said as reasonably, as steadily as he could. “I’ll make more tea. Just rest. Maybe Uulamets will show up.” But the thought in his heart was that Uulamets was not coming, that they were alone on this boat with the wind blowing them against the shore this morning, not a hope of getting off, for all his wishes to the contrary—and even if it turned, he doubted he could get the boat downriver—the more so if something as magical and powerful as the vodyanoi had other notions.

They had a breakfast offish which Pyetr helped catch, but Pyetr had no stomach for them after they had cleaned and cooked them. “The smell,” he said. “They smell like the water.”

And several times that morning that Sasha looked Pyetr’s direction he was gazing off toward the woods, just staring, lost in his thoughts or lost somewhere.

The breeze blew steadily from the west, and the boat heaved and rubbed against the broken branches. Sasha looked into the stores and had no idea what to do about feeding them, since most that they had to eat was fish and turnips and the flour was running out.

He made some of it into cakes; and Pyetr would eat that, and drink the honeyed tea, and a few of the berries.

But while Sasha was cleaning the stove and turning out the ashes, he glanced back and found Pyetr standing by the forest-side rail, looking out into the trees, and when he came there carefully to suggest Pyetr stay more to the middle of the boat, Pyetr said, “I don’t think we’ll get off this shore,” in that same lost way.

“The wind will turn,” Sasha said, upset because Pyetr had just echoed his own convictions. Pyetr grasped one of the ropes that held the mast and gave a twitch of his shoulders.

“I don’t think so,” Pyetr said, lifted the back of his right hand to his mouth and stood there looking out into the woods. “Sasha, it won’t let me alone.”

“Is she out there?”

“I think she is. Maybe she’s found a new tree.”

“You think she’s killed Uulamets?”

Pyetr did not answer for a moment. Finally he shook his head.

“Is your hand hurting?” Sasha asked.

Again a hesitation, as if the question were mere distraction to his thinking. Then a shake of his head, a deliberate effort to tear his eyes away and to look at him. “I’m not afraid to go there,” Pyetr said in a distant, bewildered tone. “I think that’s probably very stupid. This place scares me—this boat does. In there—” A glance toward the forest an arm’s length away. “In there doesn’t seem safe, either, but it doesn’t give me the feeling I have here, and I don’t trust it.”

Pyetr was asking for advice. Sasha had nothing so definite, only a sense that there was a hazard in their trying to put out again, even if the wind should shift.

But Pyetr seemed to be in touch with Eveshka, in whatever form; and Eveshka was pulling at him, not as absolutely as Eveshka could—perhaps that her power was in some fashion diminished; perhaps that it was greater—because she had not succeeded in drawing him away from the boat; but neither was he free of that pull in her absence.

More, Pyetr seemed to be reasoning quite clearly around his premonitions: his caution was persuasive; his account of Eveshka argued distress and trouble. There was a very plausible chance that Eveshka, disembodied, separated from her father, might run back to them and speak to Pyetr the way she had before—

For whatever purpose.

“You think we should go out there?” he asked Pyetr. “Be out there in the dark? That doesn’t bother you?”

Pyetr sucked at the wound on his hand and after a moment shook his head. “Not as much as staying here. That’s just what I think. I don’t insist. I don’t trust my judgment.”

“I think—” Sasha said after a breath to think twice about it, “I think there’s a reason the sail tore. I think there’s a reason we’re stuck here.—Can you talk to her? Can you get her to come here now?”

Pyetr made a face, took hold of the rope with both hands and stared into the woods a long, long moment. Then he flinched and shook his head. “Just that feeling. It’s worse.”

They set foot on shore—splintered limbs and gnarled roots were their bridge and their ladder to the sheer bank, likely the way Uulamets and Eveshka had left the boat, in Pyetr’s reckoning, if they had left of their own free will at all.

One fear left him the moment he found secure footing off the deck; but in the moment he reached back to steady Sasha in clambering down with his belongings, he found room for another, more sensible apprehension: that Sasha might have listened to him not because he was right, but because he was older, armed, and, admittedly, experienced in things about which Sasha was naive.

Perhaps, he thought, all his premonitions regarding the boat were nothing but fear of the water and the voyage home-perhaps he had tilted some delicate balance he should never have touched in Sasha.

He said, pulling the words out, “I’m still not sure of this. I don’t know I’m right. What if whatever got Uulamets is just stronger?”

Sasha hitched the ropes of the blanket toll and the basket up on his shoulders. “Then I think we’d better find it,” Sasha said. “Remember what you said about swords and magic? If it’s not going to let us leave, we’ve got to get close to it to do anything, don’t we? And the longer we wait—”

“I think I said something about fools and swords,” Pyetr said under his breath, and cast a look back at the boat, thinking he might be pushing them both into a fatal, foolish mistake. “What if whatever-it-is wants us to do this? Have you thought of that?”

“Yes,” Sasha said solemnly. “I have. But how else do we get at it?”

“God,” Pyetr muttered.

But he worked his way along the crumbling rim and past the brush.

Much better feeling, then, when they were clear of the boat. Much better, when he had gotten through the first curtain of brush and in among the trees—like coming from winter’s end into spring. He drew a slow breath, looked around him as Sasha was doing, at a woods where live moss was greening and springy underfoot, leaves were breaking pale from branches all around—the like of which he himself had never seen—certainly not in Vojvoda’s tame little garden plots, and certainly not in the dead woods the other side.

“Where?” Sasha asked him.

He wished he could say he had no idea. But when he thought about it he did. He lifted his hand and pointed nowhere, really, that looked any different from any other way through the trees, but it was absolutely certain in his mind—

A fool following a dead girl, his old friends would shake their heads and say: Pyetr’s gone quite mad.

Which was probably true, he thought—though not one of them would blink at the idea she was a ghost; and Sasha Misurov took it quite matter-of-factly, simply took a good grip on the ropes of his bedroll and his basket of what he called necessities, and motioned him to lead off—

Sasha having his salt pots and his herbs and fishing line and hooks and their cooking pan and such; while his own basket-pack had most of the food—and the bandages they had both thought of, Sasha because it was the kind of thing Sasha would think of, and himself because he had the glum opinion one of them was likely to need them; likewise a jug of vodka, medicinal, he and Sasha had quite solemnly agreed.

A bird started up from a limb, scolding them. A bush was in white bloom. The very sound was different, a constant whisper of wind in leaves and living branches.

“Certainly a more cheerful sort of place,” Pyetr said, watching the sun dapple the bracken and the limbs as they walked—no great difficulty to find a way through, the trees generously spaced and tall, the ground rising and falling in little hillocks, the rare saplings vastly overtopped by old, wide-limbed trees. The worst going was the bracken, the old growth crunching and breaking under the new as they waded knee-deep through this pathless place; but it was over all a quick progress. “Better than the woods near the house,” he looked back at Sasha to say, about to add that, over all, he had no bad feeling at all about this place.

But then cold fingers touched his neck. He spun back forward and felt a little breath of cold air hit his face.

“Pyetr?” he heard Sasha ask—Sasha was puzzled; but he had another demand on his attention at that instant, an urgent and impatient presence, carrying with it a fear he could not immediately understand. It only seemed that the contact was fading and that if he turned his head and lost touch with it now, that would be the last of it.

“It’s here,” he said. “Keep with me…”

He had no doubt now which direction to take. He started off as quickly as he could over the rough ground, dodging around thickets and up over the shoulder of the hill. He heard Sasha behind him, trusting that Sasha would keep up, and battered through increasing brush and foliage with his arms, a course virtually in a straight line, disregarding of obstacles.

“Pyetr!” he heard, and waited a breath or two, but, he felt that breath of cold again, felt a gentle touch of icy fingers, smelled a taint of river weed.

“Pyetr!” Quite close now. Sasha was all right. They both were. He started to move again, less and less liking the feeling he had of something behind them, and feeling equally strongly that safety was in front—

Himself, Pyetr Kochevikov, who only recently believed in ghosts and vodyaniye and such, found himself fighting his way uphill in blind terror of what might be stalking them and blind trust of what was guiding them—

Knowing, absolutely, that the situation might be completely backwards of what he felt—

Sasha saying, That could have been your heart, Pyetr…

He heard thunder behind him, a crack that shocked the forest, felt the increasing chill in the air and the shadowing in the sky. Sasha overtook him, held him by the arm and protested they should stop, it was coming up a rain…

No, he said, brushing off Sasha’s grip.

No. Not yet. She said not; and his feeling of where safety lay remained constant. “It’s all right,” he said to Sasha without looking at anything in its distracting detail, not Sasha, not the woods around them. “It’s Eveshka. She’s still in front of us. She’s moving…”

“She’ll come back,” Sasha said.

“I’m not sure she can,” he said, and walked while a fine mist drifted down through the branches…

They had left the bracken. It was leaf mold underfoot now, a thick carpet glistening with rain, easier going, except the brush and the thorns. He walked, followed the wisp of a notion where he was going until his side ached and his legs were shaking with every step, jogged when the presence grew fainter, caught his breath and walked again while it was-strong—until finally on the bare side of a ridge he slipped, lost his balance and skidded feet first down the slope into a rain-pocked spring.

He gasped a breath and hit the muddy ground in disgust, having landed up to the knees in water. But when he collected himself to get up he could see her reflected in the roiled surface, standing behind him.

He whirled to look, grabbing at his sword—and saw nothing but the wet leaves, the forest around him… and a very distraught Sasha Misurov coming sideways down the slippery face of the ridge to reach him.

Fool, he chided himself, heart pounding, and did not want to look back at that pool of water, because he had a cold, nape-prickling certainty that her reflection would still be there.

“Pyetr!” he heard Sasha calling him.

And saw her instead in his water-filled handprints in the leaf-mold, reflection after reflection, whole and part, repeated in every puddle and every water drop around him.

“God,” he breathed, and slowly, unwanted and irresistible impulse, looked back at the pool.

Pyetr was sitting staring at the surface of a spring, finally, when Sasha arrived, drenched and panting, at the bottom of the slope—Pyetr was just sitting, staring as if that were far more important than the fact he had nearly lost himself in the woods—or lost him, more to the point.

It was certainly not Pyetr in his right mind—Pyetr scratched and soaked, flecked with bits of dead leaves with and his hands and his breeches all muddy.

“Pyetr?” he asked.

Pyetr asked, without looking at him, “Do you see her?”

“No,” Sasha said, desperately regretting they had ever left the boat. He was trembling in the arms and the knees from the chase Pyetr had led him, and he wanted nothing so much now, if he did not carefully smother that thought, as to be back on the boat with Pyetr locked in the deckhouse, if that was what it took to keep him out of the rusalka’s reach.

“She’s the way she was,” Pyetr murmured, “not—not like at the house…”

“What do you mean, not like at the house?” A cold doubt bobbed to the surface with that: but Uulamets had always put it down, Uulamets had been so sure, Uulamets had always insisted—

He felt a wish touch him, a very strong one: befell whatever

Pyetr could see was well-disposed to them, and terrified of this place—

“That’s enough!” he said, and picked up a branch and flung it at the surface, scattering ripples. “Pyetr!”

Pyetr dropped his face into his hands, drew a breath, and did not take offense when Sasha grabbed him by the packs he was carrying and tried to haul him away from the pool. He was not strong enough; but Pyetr made his own effort to get up, leaning on his arm-Stopped then, looked away, distracted—

“Don’t,” Sasha said, hauling at him, wishing him not to look, because suddenly there was a wisp of white drifting in the tail of his eye. He looked fearfully toward it, saw a haziness in the misting rain, as if the water was settling there a moment before it fell.

He felt reassured against his will. He saw it retreat, saw the surface of the pond ripple as a veil of droplets slowly sank into it and vanished.

Pyetr walked a few steps away and sat down as if his knees had simply gone out from under him.

“What’s with Uulamets isn’t her,” Pyetr said, and rested his head in his hands. “Damn, it’s not her, it never was, it never acted right. I should have said—”

“Is that what she told you?”

“She can’t. I can’t hear her.—I just know the difference.”

Sasha sank down on his heels in front of him. He suddenly felt exhausted, cold, set about with too many questions.

“I’m not crazy,” Pyetr insisted, starting to shiver.

“I know you’re not.” He reached out and grasped Pyetr’s hand. It was like ice, white, flecked with bits of leaves and dirt. “Look, it’s raining, it’s late, we don’t know where we’re going. Let’s stop here—put up the shelter, get a fire going, have supper.”

“What were we sharing the house with?” Pyetr asked.

“I don’t know,” Sasha said, with a queasiness in his own stomach; he had never imagined he would feel safer spending the night with a rusalka than on their own—but in this place he did.

Keep away from Pyetr, he wished her; and felt she assented to that—

She wanted them safe.

Especially, and for special reasons—Pyetr.

Which notion far from reassured him.

They had supper—fish and turnips again, but honest fish and turnips. The trick was to keep the fire hot enough to overpower the drizzle—and not high enough to come back on a gust of wind and catch the canvas, which they had stretched from several makeshift poles and pegs to make a shelter: smoky from time to time, but the smoke meant warm air, and it was actually pleasant despite the sting it brought to the eyes. With a hot meal and a little measure of vodka afterward they were tolerably dry and comfortable—sitting on the wooded ridge, not by the pool, to be sure; and with the heat and light of the fire between them and Eveshka, Sasha had seen to that, having set up the shelter while Pyetr was gathering wood.

Not that he completely disbelieved the rusalka’s good intentions. But he had marked how pale Pyetr seemed by dusk, how clearly exhausted.

And he was not much better after supper.

“How are you feeling?” Sasha asked.

“All right,” Pyetr said. “I truly apologize. The stupid thing was, I knew at the time it was stupid.”

“Did you know I was behind you?”

Pyetr nodded. “But I had this feeling of something else behind us. And I couldn’t explain it. I don’t know why I couldn’t. It was altogether, irredeemably stupid—”

“That’s how strong she is. I couldn’t stop her. Or you.” He reached out and shook at Pyetr’s arm. “Be careful. I don’t think, I truly don’t think she’s after us, or we wouldn’t be sitting here right now, but that doesn’t mean she won’t change her mind.”

“She doesn’t mean us any harm,” Pyetr insisted, with a conviction that did nothing to ease Sasha’s misgivings; and Sasha shook at him a second time.

“Listen to you, Pyetr Illitch. It’s her. You know exactly what she’s making you know. Don’t start believing it. Maybe she’s on our side, maybe she wants to help her father, but she’s not alive, and you are, and that’s what she needs. Don’t be stupid. Don’t let her close to you!”

Pyetr gave a kind of shiver, staring into the fire. “That’s not easy.”

“I know it’s not easy. You’re white as a ghost tonight. Don’t let her touch you.”

Pyetr took a drink, swallowed hard, and nodded. “I know. I know that. I’m not being stubborn about it.”

“Listen, if she doesn’t tell us tomorrow morning where she thinks her father is, or what’s going on here, or what we’re going to do about it, I think we’d do best to turn south, just start walking out of this woods—”

“I know where Uulamets is,” Pyetr said, and made a motion of his hand to the general direction he had been going. “She does. He’s being a fool. I suppose wizards can be that the same as the rest of us. She’s upset about it.”

“Is she talking to you?”

Pyetr shook his head. “I just think that’s where she’s taking us.”

“Maybe we’d still better go south,” Sasha said, afraid now, wishing he had long ago listened to Pyetr when he was sure it was Pyetr’s own idea. He could only see Pyetr slipping deeper and deeper, and of that he could only see one conclusion. “We can get to the house, float a log across if we have to—”

“Hwiuur,” Pyetr reminded him, and Sasha’s heart thumped an extra beat at that name, here, where they did not want attention.

But Pyetr had no power to wish up a thing.

“Then we just walk all the way to Kiev,” Sasha said. “I’m sure there’s a ferry. And too many people around for things like him to try anything. I don’t think magical things like too many people around. I don’t think wizards do. But I don’t mind going there.”

There was long silence.

“I don’t think we’ll get there,” Pyetr said. “I don’t think we’ve a chance.”

So they were face about in their arguments. “We can try!” Sasha insisted.

And Pyetr slowly shook his head.

“What does that mean?” Sasha asked.

Pyetr did not answer.

“Pyetr, why not?”

“We won’t get there.”

Sasha stared at him, helpless, being far from him physically to make Pyetr do anything—and he did not want to wish him into it; which was immediate failure in itself.

“Feels better here,” Pyetr said. “A lot better than the boat, crazy as it sounds.”

“It’s not crazy,” Sasha said. “It is better.—But do you know—like you knew leaving me was stupid—that it’s stupid to believe her?”

After a moment Pyetr nodded, then said, “But I just have this feeling—I think it’s her, talking to me: telling me grandfather’s alive—that he’s in some kind of trouble; that if we don’t get him back something dreadful’s going to happen—something I don’t understand, but I don’t understand any of it anyway. Nothing new for me.” He reached down for the jug and started to unstop it.

And yelled and grabbed for his sword, nearly taking the shelter down as he leapt up—

—because something was skittering along the bushes near them.

Sasha tried to get out of Pyetr’s way and miss the fire at the same time; but whatever it was circled to the side behind the fire and vanished into a bush.

With a hiss.

“Babi!” Sasha exclaimed, and caught Pyetr’s arm. “Don’t scare him.”

“Don’t scare him!” Pyetr retorted; but a round black head had poked out of the brush and blinked at them.

It showed shiny white teeth, a huge row of them.

“Babi?” Sasha said.

It crept out into the firelight and the drizzle, a very abject and flat-to-the-ground Yard-thing.

“It can stay out there!” Pyetr said. “Throw it something to eat. We don’t need it in here with us.”

It crept closer, chin on ground, and folded its little manlike hands in front of its face, staring up at them.

A very diminished, very sad-looking Babi.

“Where’s Uulamets?” Sasha asked of it, and it growled.

“Pleasant as always,” Pyetr muttered, not about to put his sword away.

“But it is Babi,” Sasha said. “I’m sure it is.”

“One Thing probably looks a lot like another,” Pyetr said. “It can keep its distance!”

It crept a little closer, flat to the ground.

“That’s enough,” Pyetr said; but—

“Don’t hit it!” Sasha said, and grabbed up the food basket, found a turnip and tossed it.

Small black hands seized the offering, turned it. Babi sat up and gnawed at it with delicate, busy bites, darting little glances at them. Then it gulped the turnip in one gape of its mouth, scuttled into their shelter and grabbed Sasha around the ankle.

“Damn!” Pyetr exclaimed. Sasha yelped with the instant thought of those teeth and his leg. But it simply held on; and Sasha gingerly bent down and patted its head.

It grabbed his wrist, then, and held on as he stood up.

“Be careful!” Pyetr said.

“It’s all right,” Sasha said, trying to hold the creature in his hands. But it jumped for his chest and scrambled for his neck and ducked around behind him as Pyetr grabbed for it—after which it was still, arms locked around his neck, Pyetr in front of him with his sword lifted, and Sasha thought it a very good idea not to alarm either of them. “It’s behaving itself,” he said, calmly trying, pulling at one wiry arm, to persuade it to let go of his neck. “Come on, Babi. Let go.”

It rose up against his ear and hissed at Pyetr.

“God,” Pyetr muttered.

“It’s all right,” Sasha said, sat down on the log inside their shelter and carefully pulled Babi’s hands loose.

Babi hissed again, bounded down onto the log and down to shelter under his knees.

Pyetr stood with his sword in hand and finally, with a scowl, ran it into its sheath and rescued the jug, which fortunately had landed unbroken.

He muttered, “I suppose it’s a good sign, over all,” put the sword down and sat down inside the shelter again, his hair glistening with rain and a scowl still on his face when he looked down at the creature.

Babi took tiny fistfuls of Sasha’s breeches and climbed up into his lap.

“He’s scared,” Sasha said.

“He’s scared.” Pyetr made a face, unstopped the jug and drank. “What’s with grandfather? That’s what I’d like to know. If Ugly here ran off from it—”

Babi growled.

“Your pardon.” Pyetr hoisted the jug. “Have some?”

It scampered down and snatched up Pyetr’s cup, holding it up with both hands.

Pyetr poured. It drank, gulp after gulp, and held it up for more.

“I’d be careful,” Sasha said.

He poured; it drank, and held up the cup again.

“Bottomless little devil,” Pyetr said, and filled it again. “What’s grandfather into? Do you know?”

It gulped the third cup, exhaled, and fell down in a heap where it stood.

Pyetr gave Sasha a puzzled look.

“I don’t know,” Sasha said.