“I did not!”Minka cried. Her lips, stained blue, told a contrary tale. So did her sticky fingertips, and the smudges on her linen shirt-dress where she’d wiped them. “A lady gave them to me, I told you!”
They instantly fell to squabbling again, Magda’s accusations and Minka’s protestations tumbling one over the other.
“…selfish, greedy piglet…”
“…weren’t that many, only a few that she…”
“…no lady, just wanted them for yourself…”
“…was so! A pretty lady, and sad, up by the willow pond…”
Pavla gave them each a firm shake. “Back to the house with you both. There are chores to be done.”
The girls regarded her for a moment, then drew together in defiance, setting their dispute aside.
“You can’t tell us what to do,” Minka said. “You aren’t our mother.”
“You aren’t anybody’s mother,” added Magda, mouth curling in a sneer.
“I am your mother’s sister and she asked me to look after you.”
“We don’t need looking after.” Magda’s chin jutted. “I’m old enough to…”
“To what?” Pavla cut in. “To take care of the little ones?” She pointed at their younger siblings.
Tati, the baby, was soaked through and fussing in her own filth. Pyotki’s clumsy bow-legged steps had tottered him most of the way to the stump they used as a chop-block, where someone – lazy Dmitros, most likely – had left the axe within reach of curious hands.
Magda flushed darker red. “I’ll see to them.”
Minka laughed, then faltered when Pavla’s attention shifted to her.
“The willow pond, you say?” Pavla asked. “And what were you doing up there where you’re not supposed to go? You know your father doesn’t want any of you wandering too far from home.”
“It isn’t that far,” Minka said, scuffing one bare foot in the dirt.
“Ha!” jeered Magda, smirking, as she ran to fetch Pyotki. He shrieked with cheated outrage, kicking and struggling when Magda picked him up. The noise of him set baby Tati to howling as well.
And to think, Pavla thought as she herded them back toward the manor, how often she’d bemoaned never having children. Of course, if she had, her life would have been far different. Oleg wouldn’t have divorced her, taking a new wife with unseemly haste. She wouldn’t have been left dependent on the generosity of her sister and brother-in-law, as Vadya took frequent opportunity to remind her.
From mistress of her own household to no better than a servant in theirs, but what else was there for her to do? When, a year ago, an uncle of Pyotr’s had died and left him an inheritance of land and wealth, the family had moved here…Pavla included. Because, as before, what else was there for her to do?
Vadya, pregnant yet again, met them at the manor’s door. In deference to the day’s heat, she wore just her loose shift and had it unlaced at the neck with its hem pinned above her knees. The strings of her linen cap dangled, she was flour-sprinkled from baking, and her hair was sweat-pasted to her brow.
“I heard my Pyotki,” she said.
Pavla snorted. “You and everyone in Ladikov.”
“Lusty lungs and a healthy heart.” Her proud smile faded into a grimace when she saw Tati, and her eyebrows rose upon noticing Minka’s blue-stained mouth. “Sister, what have you been letting the girls get into?”
“Ask your Magda.”
“Magda! Weren’t you watching them?”
“I was!” she whined.
“Look at Tati! She’s filthy! You’ll give her a bath, and wash out those clothes.”
“But Mamochka…”
“Don’t make me tell you twice, Magda Elena.”
Minka tittered snidely, Magda made a terrible face at her, and Vadya swatted them both before hoisting Pyotki onto her hip. She crooned at him, her fine young prince, the very image of his father, yes he was…
“Is that all?” she interrupted herself, peering into the pails. “And so muddy! More silt than water.”
“The stream’s running low this hot summer,” Pavla said. She reached for the pails. “I’ll bring more…”
“No, no, we need you in the kitchen; that useless old slave-woman doesn’t have your touch with the coals, and I won’t serve my husband unevenly-cooked loaves. Where’s Dmitros?”
“Asleep in the cheese cellar,” said Magda, leaping at the chance to tattle and deflect the trouble from herself.
“Oh is he?” Vadya stomped to the top of the steps and shouted the boy’s name into the cooler darkness of the stone-lined chamber below.
He sulked his way upstairs, twelve years of age, growing fast, tall and gangly. His hair hung too-long in his eyes. When his mother told him what she wanted, he commenced to complain.
“…take most of the day to carry enough…”
“Then sooner gotten to it, sooner gotten done.” Vadya thrust the pails at him. As he made a great show of taking them, she rounded on Minka. “And you, girl, what is this, berry-stains? What have you to say?”
“She found bilberry bushes and wouldn’t share,” Magda said.
“No! The sad lady gave them to me, just a handful!”
“What sad lady?” Vadya glanced at Pavla, who shrugged.
“She said she was up by the willow pond,” Pavla said. “I told her Pyotr wouldn’t approve.”
“I should say not! When his own uncle died there?” She pinched Minka hard on the rim of the ear. “I won’t hear of you going near there again. It’s a dangerous place. The rocks are slick and the water deep. If you fell in, you’d be unable to climb out. You’d drown like a rat in a rain-barrel, do you hear me?”
“Yes, Mamochka.” Minka hung her head.
Dmitros trudged out, the pails swinging at the ends of his arms. As he ducked under the door-lintel, he cast back a quick glance, something furtive and sly. Pavla saw it; Vadya, occupied again with Pyotki, did not. But it was no concern of hers, so she paid it no more mind. The kitchen awaited, where old Alba stirred at the coals.
The slave-woman, like the land and manor, and the livestock in their pens, had been part of Pyotr’s inheritance from his uncle. Despite Vadya’s opinion, she was far from useless, but she was frail and slow, and prone to superstition.
“A swallow landed on the sill this morning,” Alba said by way of greeting. “I went to chase it away but it flew in before I could.”
“Is that a bad omen?” asked Pavla, tying an apron around her waist.
“Very bad. It circled the room several times before flying back out. That means a death in the house soon, at least one, maybe more.”
“Don’t say such things. You’ll frighten the children, and upset their parents.”
Alba harumphed but held her tongue. They busied themselves with the bread-making, the kitchen already so like an oven that it barely seemed they needed the coals. From time to time, they heard Vadya scolding the girls and other servants of the house. Dmitros failed to come back promptly, to his mother’s irritation; if he had gone off to nap in the cow-barn or behind the sheep-byre, she declared, she would turn him over her knee, half-grown lad or not. Tati had to make do with silty bath-water after all.
Then there was from the fields a dreadful commotion. One of the plow-teams had gone spooked and wild, injuring many men, two of them severely. The rest, at Pyotr’s direction, carried them into the hall. Everything became a flurry of excitement and activity, bandages, blood, and broken bone. Aleks, at fifteen the eldest of Vadya’s brood still living at home, was sent on the run to the village for the physician and the priest.
Soon it seemed most of Ladikov crowded indoors. This was much to Vadya’s distress, that the lady of the manor be seen in such disarray, in just her shift. Pyotr, for his part, grumbled that the day’s work should be so disrupted.
The wife of a farmer whose skull had been split by an ox-hoof wept as she went from wife to widow before their very eyes. Alba gave Pavla a significant nod. A death in t
he house, the old slave-woman had said…and here it was. At least one, she’d said. But, the other badly-injured man, ribs crushed and coughing a red foam with each ragged breath, seemed tenacious in his clinging to life.
Despite everything, Pavla did not neglect the bread. She and Alba, risking Vadya’s disapproval, shared the warm golden loaves out among the villagers, along with pots of ale and wedges of cheese. In times of tragedy, neighbors should pull together, should they not? That was Pavla’s thinking, though she knew Pyotr’s uncle had been of mean and miserly reputation, his family not much loved by those who owed and gave them duty.
The evening passed in such a hectic confusion that they all fell exhausted into their beds once the last of the village folk had gone home. It wasn’t until morning, when Pyotr woke early to rouse them to chores, that they discovered Dmitros still hadn’t returned from fetching water. They also discovered that Aleks had brought another peasant girl into his room, but that was only to be expected, and she fled in shame under Vadya’s scornful eye.
Dmitros, however…his father was furious, vowing to stripe him head to heels with a leather belt for so shirking his work. “When I find him…”
That was when Magda uttered a sudden ear-splitting scream.
Minka, on the cot beside hers, lay motionless…cold, still and dead.
Her lips were once again blue, her face grey-pale and bloated. On a limp, out-flung hand, the fingertips had gone soft, white-wrinkled. Moisture beaded her skin. Her hair spread wet around her head. The blanket tucked around her was only damp, but soaked further when Pyotr grabbed her up in his arms and water spilled from her slackened mouth.
Vadya added her screams to Magda’s. Tati and Pyotki joined in.
It almost seemed Minka had drowned in her own bed.
All any of them could think was that the berries she’d eaten must not have been bilberries at all, something of a deadly poison instead. Vadya clutched the rest of her children to her bosom, rocking back and forth, wailing.
“Where did she find them?” Pyotr demanded.
“She said a sad lady gave them to her,” replied Pavla. “Up by the willow pond.”
At that, old Alba made a warding-off sign, her eyes wide with horror. “Rusalka!”
Pyotr scowled. “More of your foolish superstition?”
“No, m’lord, it is truth! They say she was a girl whose lover proved false in his promises, abandoning her to marry another, so she drowned herself in despair but became a rusalka, a river-spirit. She dwells in the depths, tempting the little ones with sweet fruit, luring men and maidens…”
“Enough,” he said. “See to my wife. Aleks, go look for these berry bushes. I would know what caused this. Pavla, go with him. Should you meet that wretched lout, Dmitros, give him a kick and send him home straightaway.”
No one dared argue. His features were grim-set, a father about to begin the task of readying a child for the grave. Only a daughter, to be sure…but a sorrowful thing nonetheless.
Pavla donned a simple dress over her shift, tied on her cap, and laced up her worn leather shoes. She followed Aleks out, keeping easy pace with her nephew’s long strides. He was a tall youth, and handsome, and seemed more disgruntled at having his aunt along for company than he’d been at having his latest conquest driven in disgrace from the house.
The sun was only just climbing above the hills to the east, but already the day was warm and the sky like burnished metal. Insects buzzed in the dry grasses. Somewhere, a bird chirped, desultory. Down in Ladikov, farmers were already stirring to their labors.
To the north, the land rose more rugged, stonier and tangled with sparse woody groves. Creeks trickled through cattails in green, marshy places. Here and there, stalks were bent or crushed, as if someone had recently come through with a hand-cart or barrow.
Which, as they soon saw, someone had. The little cart from the work-shed sat in a clearing within sight of the willow. In it were the water-pails Pavla had used the day before, which Dmitros had taken. In it also were some dented cookpots that had been awaiting the tinker’s next visit, an old leaky bucket, two empty clay milk-jugs, an ale pot and a chipped soapstone wash-basin.
The boy was industrious in his laziness, if nothing else. He’d heard the pond mentioned and must have seized upon an idea: rather than go several times back and forth from the stream that fed the manor estate, rather than half-filling the pails in the shallow widening formed by a dam of flat rocks, why not load up as many spare vessels as he could find, and make but a single trip? He could bring back water in abundance, clear and not silty, so that even Vadya might have no cause to complain.
Aleks reached the same conclusion, grumbling that his brother first found a cool spot to rest himself, but instead of a nap slept the whole night away.
Pavla at first could not find it in her heart to blame Dmitros. It was serene here, so peaceful, the shade-dappled pool welling glassy amid moss-draped boulders…the willow itself leaning so that its slender green-clad branches trailed the surface…dimpled where the hair-fine legs of water-skimmers skated around white lilies and delicate fallen leaves…the air sweetly fragrant…
…the figure sprawled on the bank, head submerged, too-long hair and lanky arms floating…
“Dmitros!” Aleks rushed ahead, dropping to his knees. He dragged the younger boy out of the pond and rolled him onto his back.
It was by far too late. Like Minka, his face was grey-pale, his lips blue, his skin wrinkled. Like Minka, water gushed from his mouth. Unlike Minka, however, he looked to have fought, if vainly, against his fate. The ground near him was gouged and clawed at, reeds torn up. His knees and elbows had scraped bloody against the rough soil. Bruises ringed his throat.
“He’s dead,” said Aleks. “Someone killed him, held him under, look at those marks…murder!”
Pavla thought of Vadya and Pyotr, of bringing them this bleak news on the heels of the discovery of Minka’s lifeless body. Of telling them that Dmitros must have striven with strength and will to survive, to no avail…and how it must have been for him, kicking and struggling, hands slapping at the water in great splashing gouts as the bubbles rose wavering like quicksilver to burst his last expelled air around him…
“We cannot leave him here like this,” she said. “Your parents should not have to see it.”
Aleks only nodded, sitting slumped with incomprehension. Pavla went to the place where Dmitros had left the cart. She removed the various vessels from it, thinking to come back for them later and to use the cart to bear her nephew’s corpse back to the house.
From behind her came a gentle sound as of wavelets lapping the shore. She heard Aleks gasp, and turned to see him staring, transfixed, at the pond.
A woman-shape emerged from the pool’s surface…emerged from it and of it, as if it flowed upward to become her…taking form, the form of supple limbs and maidenly curves…naked but with modesty preserved by long hair that fell streaming…beautiful, without blemish…her substance rippling and clear, as of water…liquid yet somehow made solid… Rusalka, Alba had said. River-spirit.
Silent tears ran from the rusalka’s deep eyes. With a look that both pleaded and yearned, she extended her dripping arms toward Aleks.
He rose to his feet like a sleepwalker, spellbound.
“Aleks!” Pavla cried. She rushed to him and grasped his wrist.
He shook her off and continued as if transfixed, stepping over the corpse of his brother. When Pavla grasped him again, he whirled on her. “Leave me be!”
“She’ll kill you, she’ll drown you, just as she…”
“I said leave me be! Scrawny, useless old hag!” So shouting, Aleks gave Pavla such a shove that she fell full-length on the ground and lay stunned.
She watched with helpless terror as her nephew moved closer to those outstretched, imploring arms. Aleks reached the edge, poised on slippery stones, his toes in the water. The rusalka glided to meet him, tears glimmering like jewels. He went eagerly as she enfol
ded him in her fluid embrace. He surrendered his lips to the rusalka’s kiss. Their mouths melded together, cool water meeting flesh. His palms slid over her sleek contours. The rusalka stroked the nape of his neck.
Then her grip clasped him unyielding. Her fair features changed. Her eyes flashed like sun-dazzle glinting bright on a treacherous lake. She fastened to him like the bite of a leech. And, like a leech, she began to drink.
His body jerked. He thrashed and flailed in a wild, awkward dance. He beat uselessly at the rusalka with open hands and closed fists, neither having the slightest effect but passing through her the way they would have passed through plain water, cutting troughs that instantly filled back in. He strained with all his might to pull away, and could not.
The rusalka drank. She drained him. In the span of a few heartbeats, strong young limbs withered. Skin tightened, cracking and splitting, peeling away in long flaking strips. His eyes shriveled at the bottoms of their hollow sockets, no longer moist round orbs but lumps like dried fruit.
What fell away when the rusalka released him was a wizened husk, so frail and shrunken it might have been disinterred from the tomb of some ancient king. It clattered to the earth, this thing that had been a vital youth, now little more than a cluster of jointed sticks wrapped in leather and straw.
Pavla, horror-struck, certain she would be next, huddled as low to the ground as she could press herself.
But the rusalka, well-fed, tears still coursing, just gazed at the desiccated remains. She glided backward to the pool’s center as fluidly as she’d come. There, with a watery sigh like a sob, she sank beneath the surface again, until only the spreading ripples showed where she’d been.
Even the ripples soon stopped, leaving the willow pond placid as glass.
Carefully, cautiously, Pavla got up. The heat of the day did nothing to quell the marrow-deep chills inside her. She shivered, and only by force of will kept her teeth from chattering. Gooseflesh crept over her arms.
She kept a wary watch on the water, moving as quietly as she could to load the bodies of her nephews into the cart. Dmitros was the heavier, a sodden deadweight. Lifting Aleks was no harder than lifting a hay-bale or bundle of kindling-wood, though the dry-parched leatheriness of his skin was revolting to the touch.
The Bestiarum Vocabulum (TRES LIBRORUM PROHIBITUM) Page 28
