Rusalka

CHAPTER 31

UULAMETS CHANTED SOFTLY, while the smoke went up, and ghosts swirled through their midst—but not within the smoke. Uulamets mixed ash and herbs into one of his small pots, then took a small flint blade and cut his wrist with it, bleeding into the bowl. “You,” he said to Sasha.

Sasha, head spinning from the smoke, set the knife to his arm and brought it sharply down. Blood made a steady drip into the pot—not so painful: but his hands shook as he gave the items back.

“Vodka couldn’t hurt,” Uulamets said, then, and unstopped the jug and took a drink and added that, too, which gave Sasha a queasy feeling as much as the bloodletting. “Don’t you know?” he asked, indignant, and Uulamets :

“No.” Uulamets stopped the jug, stirred the mix with a carved bit of bone, added moss and another powder. “It can vary.” He took a twig from the fire and poked the burning end into the pot.

It went up with a puff of fire, and Uulamets hastily danced it from one hand to the other, tamped in more herbs, then put the hollow bone into it and covered the bowl with his hand while he breathed the smoke through the bone.

He passed pot and bone to Sasha. “Breathe deep,” he said, and as Sasha did that, “deeper.—Good lad.”

His chest burned; his eyes blurred from tears as Uulamets took it back, sucked in several more puffs, then suddenly leaned forward, grasped him by the shoulder and blew smoke into his face, saying, again, “Breathe.”

He did that. He did it twice and three times, and Uulamets wished him—he felt it start—let go, breathe the smoke he breathed, deeper and deeper, back and forth—

Breathe out, breathe out, breathe out, hold nothing back—

Heart and soul, boy, breathe it out—

He was not governing his own body: Uulamets kept the breath coming out of him until he was fainting, falling against the old man’s hands.

Then Uulamets made him breathe in, larger and deeper breaths, until there were enough of them and often enough mat Sasha could clench his hands and move his limbs and know that it was his own volition, that he was back from wherever he had been—

But not without change. Not without a feeling of intimacy that made him afraid not to look into Uulamets’ eyes, and have Uulamets’ look into his, but he did that; because Uulamets wanted him to.

The will went out of him, then, his hand lifted without his knowing why, and the raven landed on his wrist, its wings fanning smoke that stung his eyes. It hopped then to Uulamets’ outstretched hand and then to his shoulder, not objecting to the smoke or the fire, turning its single glittering eye toward him.

Not a natural creature, very, very old, its feathers dulled, half-blind before Uulamets had wished it to his service and given it his heart, having no living thing else.

“Better him than Draga,” Uulamets said, and flung it aloft, a heavy flap of wings into the night above the fire. “I wasn’t totally a fool.”

Sasha knew other things, when he tried to think about Pyetr’s whereabouts: he wanted to know where Pyetr was, and instead knew too much about Draga, and women—things he had never experienced in his life; and most of all about Eveshka and Uulamets and Chernevog, so that he plunged his head into his hands and felt the whole world spinning, his innocence despicable and dangerous-He wanted to know about Pyetr, it was all he wanted, it was all that was left of everything he personally wanted—and he understood now that that wish had importance to people everywhere in the land, for generations and generations of Vojvodas and Kievs as far as he could think of—knew that the wish for

Pyetr’s safety above all else might give everything to Chernevog, who might already have killed him.

“Head over heart,” Uulamets said, laying a hand on his shoulder, shaking him gently, and Sasha wiped his eyes and nodded, trying, god! trying not to wish anything for a while.

“Eventually you know,” Uulamets said, “you’re better off without a heart. My friend up there could carry both—”

Sasha shook his head, wiped his eyes again and swallowed the lump in his throat, trying to think, simply to think what to want.

That people be free and good-minded and safe from calamities: that wizards everywhere want that above all—

“Unfortunately,” Uulamets said, “we have our faults. Our hearts aren’t perfect. And when we’re a damned, self-centered fool like our enemy, we’re in trouble.”

We should wish for the most right things, Sasha thought.

“That’s very good,” Uulamets said, “but in the meanwhile our enemy has more power than we do and we’re not likely to get our way just by wishing, are we?”

“So what are we going to do?”

“The power of names,” Uulamets said, and jabbed a finger at his chest. “Specificity over generality. When you wish for something specific and put a name on that one little thing—” Uulamets measured a tiny distance with his fingers, the size of a gnat. “That will go right through a wide, vague wish, like a stone through smoke. Poof. Wishes work best on unbalanced things.”

“So it’s who’s smarter.”

“And gifted. And what resources he has. Our enemy’s betting on all three. He’s a fool on a grand scale—but not in the little ones.”

“Didn’t he wish not to get caught stealing?”

“This book—” Uulamets laid a hand on the pack that he always kept close to him. “Is like that jug of yours. Like the raven. Nothing can happen to it so long as I live. Nothing will ever break that damned jug, till the day you die. Don’t do things like that lightly, hear me?”

“The ghosts aren’t bothering us—” Sasha realized of a sudden, off the thought of having failed in his recent wishes.

“He’s thinking again. Or we’ve overpowered them by knowing what we want. Who knows?”

“Isn’t he going to know?”

“Maybe. If he’s paying attention.”

“But aren’t—” He did not want to quarrel with master Uulamets, but he had the most overwhelming anxiety about their waiting till morning.

“What you haven’t learned,” Uulamets said, lifting a cautionary finger, “what you haven’t learned that you absolutely must, boy, is that a wizard can do more with a clear head at a distance man he can do, muddled and exhausted, close at hand—at least where it regards an enemy well-rested, comfortable, who’s had ample while to decide what he’s going to do about us. What we have to do—what we have to do is find his weaknesses and deny him the specific things he wants us to do. And get close enough and wise enough to see the specific things to undo him. Back and forth, you see. Rapidly. Very like any other kind of fighting. Dawn’s coming soon. I’m going to wish us both to sleep.”

“If that’s a mistake, if that’s what he’s wishing us—”

Uulamets tapped him on the forehead. “You don’t want something to happen. Vague as smoke. Wish instead with me: that we wake up safe, unrobbed, unthreatened, and in time, in spite of him. And shut up.”

Uulamets tapped his forehead a second time, he felt himself going, and had wits left only enough to grab his blanket and dispose himself safely on the ground.

He doubted their safety: he tried with all the force he had to believe everything was safe while sleep was overwhelming him…

And was next aware of light falling on his face and of a rustling of dead leaves, before something landed on his chest and grabbed his collar.

“God!” he gasped, eyes wide, nose-to-button nose and eye-to-moonlike eye with a black fur-ball. “Babi!”

Babi shook at him, hissing, distraught—

Babi, who had been with Pyetr—

“Master Uulamets!—Get off me, Babi, I’m trying to get up!”

“One never knows,” Uulamets said. “I wished for help, and… to tell the stark truth, I’d hoped for leshys…”

“But I sent him to stay with Pyetr,” Sasha protested, gathering the dvorovoi into his arms and staggering to his feet. Babi hugged his neck and buried his face in his collar, all of which said to him that Babi was not in fact the help Uulamets had hoped for. Babi was help to no one at the moment. “Babi wouldn’t have left him—”

“It’s certainly no small thing that’s driven him off,” Uulamets said, and immediately began gathering up his pack. “Babi! Come here!”

Babi vanished from Sasha’s arms, to the dismay of both of them—simply ceased to be there, or anywhere in their vicinity. “Babi!” Sasha cried softly, casting about to find him; and from Uulamets knew only that it was a very badly used, very frightened Babi—apt to return to them at any moment, or whatever Babi considered a moment, but gone for now to a Place magical creatures could reach and no magician could.

Where is that? Sasha’s wondered; and Uulamets, shrugging on his pack, said, “They know. We don’t. I’m not sure we’d want to be there. Pack up and come on.”

Uulamets believed Babi’s appearance meant something direly wrong, that cam* through all too strongly, and Sasha tried to keep himself from panic as they hiked at the best pace they could manage along the overgrown bank, following the stream for a road.

One or the other of them—he was sure it was Uulamets, because he had never held such terrible ideas in his life—thought what a wizard could do to an ordinary man like Pyetr, if that wizard were vindictive: whichever of the two of them was responsible for that thought tried not to dwell on it—Sasha was sure he was trying, so maybe his own imagination had grown too wide and too terrible since he and master Uulamets had—

—had done whatever had happened last night, which left his head crammed with constantly surfacing things he had never wanted to know, understandings too fast and too terrible even for Uulamets, who kept telling him be quiet, stop thinking at him.

Uulamets himself was upset, Uulamets tried with all his good sense not to strike out at him or flinch from him: “Grow up, boy!” Uulamets said to him; and Sasha tried as hard as he could to be a man, the way he understood a man ought to be—

Which was Pyetr, so far as he had ever wanted to be anyone.

That was not by far master Uulamets’ choice: Uulamets thought Pyetr a bad man and undependable and self-indulgent.

Wrong, Sasha thought.

“Besides,” he said aloud, “he’s ordinary, and we’re not—you have to allow for that.”

“I don’t have to,” Uulamets said, “and I won’t.”

Sasha thought something then he had no desire at all to say to Uulamets : You’d have been better off if you had had somebody like Pyetr. You wouldn’t have been lonely all your life and somebody would have liked you.

The old man said harshly, “And made mistakes like yours and his, young fool.” Meanwhile Uulamets was thinking, My own are enough—because he bitterly remembered Draga and how beautiful she had been—how for Draga, he had almost made the mistake of calling back his heart, a long, long time ago, where she could have gotten hold of it.

That’s what Eveshka did, Sasha thought helplessly, and tried not to: it greatly upset Uulamets, as if in all these years he had never remembered that feeling, until he had—Uulamets’ thought—a damned boy pushing at him, making him remember too far back-To being alone; and the fire killing his parents; and uncle Fedya; and Uulamets’ father taking him deep into the woods when he was very small and giving him to an old woman, who was a wizard, and crazed, and very wicked and spiteful—

It was Sasha who wanted not to remember now, things far worse than uncle Fedya could ever think of, wishes for harm on someone, wishes to convince someone he was a failure and worthless, so he could wish he were dead—

“Worse than any beating, boy,” Uulamets muttered as they struggled with the undergrowth. “You should have lived with old Malenkova. Crazy as a loon and mean as winter.” Uulamets was thinking by then of Eveshka and how he had failed with her: he had truly meant to teach her in a better, kinder way; but that had been a mistake: she had been willful as Draga.

Even so he wished, quite dangerously, that he could save her

Because a damned boy held on to a heart that was going to ruin them both, against all advice.

“Stop it,” Uulamets said, “fool!” and turned with every intent to teach a boy a lesson—

Deserved, Sasha thought: but Uulamets flinched from hitting him in the face, grabbed him instead by his collar, still aching to beat him the way his teacher had him, for his own sake, and all the world’s sake, until he gained a different view of things and stopped being a shallow-minded, flittering boy—

I’m not, Sasha thought; and wondered, having had all those years dealing with Fedya Misurov, who did not think half so deeply, or deserve half so much respect: Why don’t you just take it from me? You could.

That made Uulamets want to hit him for a different reason, which Uulamets himself did not understand, except it misapprehended him, and made him out a good man: Uulamets did not want people liking him, or expecting things a wizard could not in good conscience owe anybody, not his daughter, not a student, certainly not a light-witted scoundrel like Pyetr Kochevikov—

“Who’s probably dead, damn you,” Uulamets muttered. “You’d better make up your mind to count him gone, because he’s your weakness, boy. You’re going to flinch when you shouldn’t, because you’re too soft, you’re too weak, and the one favor you can do me for the rest of this hike, boy’t, is to watch the woods around you, look at the leaves, think about the leaves and nothing but the leaves, hear me? Or if your friend is alive you’ll destroy every last chance we have to do anything for anybody.”

“Yes, sir,” Sasha said meekly, knowing what the old man in his experience was saying: no doubts, no quibbles, no holding back. He tried to think about the trees, the leaves, the sound of the wind: sometimes—Uulamets angrily pulled him back from it—about the ghosts and what their absence meant.

“Pay attention!” Uulamets said with a painful jerk at his arm. “Scatterbrain, think of nothing.”

He understood, he apologized, he slipped with Uulamets into nothing and beyond that into nowhere, while the light dimmed, the air grew chill, and rain fell as a light patter among the leaves. “Don’t wish not,” master Uulamets said. “Be patient. Make no noise.”

So one watched where one was walking, one admired the water drops, one thought of beads on a branch, the rim of beads on a new leaf—anything that touched eyes, touched mind, being totally here and wanting nothing, and thereby totally silent in the woods.

But there came a change in the woods. They walked through a curtain of brush into a dead region, trees so long dead their limbs were white and naked, their trunks only patched with bark.

Want nothing, Sasha thought: he had had that knack once, back home among ordinary people, for their protection. Want nothing, wish nothing away, simply watch and see and accept what came.

Tree after dead tree, a forest not only dead but long dead, their stream flowing between banks of barren earth, utterly lifeless—not so much as moss or leaves out of this tributary of the river, not so much as a lichen on a tree. Barren earth, dust, that the misting rain turned to mud-Master Uulamets believed he knew the way, and Sasha did not question that, only wondered how he knew—and recalled long ago when the ferryboat had traveled further, and Malenkova’s house, Uulamets’ own teacher—

Her house was here, beside the old road, he thought, and recollected days of trade and travelers—

He shied away from that thought as Uulamets’ anger warned him, because it was dangerous to think about their enemy.

Consider only the trees.

They walked farther and farther into the barren ground, amid what began to be an open, level strip along the stream, where no tree had grown, seemingly, when the forest was green: the vanished road out of the east, the route of traders in times too long ago for a boy to remember. Malenkova’s old house.

Tenanted again.

One wanted to wonder-—

“No,” Uulamets said. “Think about the rain. Think about the sky.”

“I—” Sasha began, and saw something through the gray haze of trees, distant, moving toward them, ghostly white. He wanted to know what it was.

Uulamets grabbed his arm and stopped him in his tracks, and all he knew was a muddle, as if wishes conflicted, his, Uulamets’, the god knew: his wits were too scrambled to make sense of it, but his eyes saw a desperate, white-shirted man coming toward them.

It looked—Father Sky, it looked like Pyetr, was Pyetr—

“Wait,” Uulamets said, and jerked his arm painfully the instant he saw blood on Pyetr’s shirt and moved to disobey. “Scatterwits! No! Look at it!”

Uulamets wished, with everything both of them had, and Pyetr—

—melted, headlong, into a bear-shape shambling toward them.

“No!” Sasha cried, Uulamets wished, and it melted to a black puddle that flowed into the ground.

“That’s our shape-shifter,” Uulamets said, still holding Sasha’s arm, wishing the thing back to whatever hole it had come from. “Know what it is and it can’t work its tricks. The power of names, boy.”

If it had taken Pyetr’s shape, Sasha thought, trembling now it was gone, if it did that, if it was one of their enemy’s creatures and not the vodyanoi’s, then their enemy knew who Pyetr was. Their enemy might have wished him—

Uulamets gripped his arm, hurting him. “Save it. You’re right, he does know more than we’d like. Don’t think about it. Most of all don’t believe what attracts you, not in this game, do you understand me now, boy? Catch me once, not twice with that trick.”

I can’t help it, Sasha thought. If he aimed at Pyetr, Pyetr may be with him—

With Eveshka—

Uulamets’ fingers pulled at Sasha’s arm as he started walking again: Uulamets was angry, angry at his own anger: smothering it, killing it with long-practiced indifference. “He’s trying to shake us,” Uulamets muttered, and let him go to walk beside him. “He’s not going to. No tempers, boy, no resentments, what seems, isn’t necessarily so, you understand me? Believe things aren’t the worst, they won’t be the worst, quiet your damned self-doubt, boy, you can do anything you want to do, just want it enough and don’t stop till you’ve got it.”

Pyetr, Sasha thought, and tried to unwish that—as the raven swooped low, winged past them like a shadow and went aloft again, down the road. God, no, he thought, helpless totally to wish no. God, master Uulamets, I’m sorry, I’m sorry—

“Fine help,” Uulamets said, flinging his arm aloft as they walked. “—Find my daughter, that’s what you’re good for, you feathered thief! Go!”

“I didn’t mean it,” Sasha said miserably.

“Wish confusion on our enemies,” Uulamets said under his breath. “And trust the bird. One of those things a magician can only do a few times in his life, don’t ask me why I picked a damned crow—ask me why I didn’t choose a bear, a wolf at the least.”

The bird had been Uulamets’ pet when he was a boy. That came through, along with a memory of the house where they were going, a ramshackle place of towers, a terrible old woman intending the raven’s death—

A scared young wizard, desperately protecting the only living thing he loved—

Uulamets shut that away, like a door slamming, with the thought that their enemy’s attack had already had its effect, Pyetr was their point of division, Pyetr was the unstable point—

Sasha thought—

Things change that can change—