Rusalka (v1.3)

by C. J. Cherryh

  “We hit ground on the way in. I think there’s this long ridge—”

  “We put the sail up just part way—it ought to blow us back a little. Maybe turn us around.”

  Sasha looked a little more cheerful then.

  “Wish up a wind for the morning, if you want something to do.”

  “I’ll try,” Sasha said, and rubbed his face with his hands.

  “But you’re right about the salt. He left us most of it. Maybe he was thinking about that.”

  “Considerate of him,” Pyetr said.

  They cooked a comfortable supper on the little stove—fresh grilled fish, right out of the river, Sasha having thought to bring fishhooks—and they cleaned up and flung the ashes overside, by which time the sky across the river was dimming from its last colors and the stars were coming out.

  Sasha scattered salt and sulphur all across the deck then, one end of the boat to the other, and Pyetr forbore to suggest he try a few incantations and some smoke as well: Sasha would surely take it amiss, but, sincerely, if salt worked he saw no reason to stint on the rest of Uulamets’ rituals, rattles and singing and the rest of it: it all seemed alike to him.

  Sasha did take a cup of vodka and draw a circle on the deck, which Pyetr watched, hands on hips, with some curiosity.

  “So the wind won’t blow a gap in it,” Sasha said, “and I don’t think water’s a good idea.”

  After which he scattered salt and sulphur right along that wet line, so it stuck.

  Smart lad, Pyetr thought. “As a wizard,” he said, “you don’t do a bad job.”

  “I hope,” Sasha said. “You’ve got that little bit I gave you.”

  Pyetr patted his pocket. “Absolutely.”

  Sasha looked at him as if to decide whether he was being laughed at, dusted his hands off and set the cup of salt and sulphur on the deck inside the circle. He handed Pyetr the cup with the vodka in it. “Nothing wrong with it,” he said. “It’s leftover.”

  Pyetr grinned, took the cup and sipped it at his leisure.

  He took a second, full one, but that was all, since he had no inclination to sleep too deeply this night. They lay looking at the stars and listening to the sounds of the boat, and planning how they would get off the shore and how they had to be sure to come to the house and the landing by daylight or risk missing it—discussing too—he could not figure out how an enterprising scoundrel had gotten to this pass—how they could get through the winter there, and how the garden could be better than it was and what they could do with the bathhouse to repair the roof.

  He knew nothing about gardening or carpentry. Sasha did. Sasha was quite happy talking about turnips and beans and roof-mending, and if it eased his mind, Pyetr was willing to listen.

  Only somewhere in the midst of Sasha’s plans for the spring planting Pyetr’s eyes began to close, and he began to drift—which he had not planned to do. He said, “I’m done. Get some sleep. I won’t swear to how long I’ll stay awake otherwise.”

  “I can stay awake.”

  “I’m sure. But I know I will.” He did not say that he had had practice at long watches in activities he did not want to explain to Sasha. He only sat up, laid his sword across his lap and propped his elbows on his knees, settling for a long night.

  Sasha started to say something else about the bathhouse. “Hush,” Pyetr said. “I’m not staying awake so you can talk.”

  Sasha hushed. Things were quiet after that, no sound but the water, the branches and some forlorn raucous thing chirping in the brush on this warmer night. Eventually it gave up. He listened only to the river, rested comfortably, and, after some hours, as a cold breeze began to kick up off the water, he thought about it a while, then finally unstopped the jug and poured himself a quarter of a cup, just enough to warm the blood.

  Absolutely no more than that.

  But he found himself nodding when he had finished it, his head dropping toward his chest. He straightened and stretched his arms and his back and shifted position. He ought, he thought, to take a walk around the deck—outside the salt circle, it might be, but things were quiet and the center of the deck was no problem.

  He got up as quietly as he could, because sleep was coming down on him irresistibly and he figured the vodka now for very bad judgment. He looked to the wind to clear his head and wake him up, took a walk to the middle of the deck and turned around with a start as something moved in the tail of his eye.

  He saw Eveshka walking, then, near the rail, saw her hair and her gown wet and the water streaming off her sleeves as she turned and held out her hands to him.

  “Sasha!” he yelled, as lethargy came tumbling down on him, in the desperate hope that Sasha was not caught in it, asleep though he was…

  But such salt as the wind left on the deck seemed no hindrance to her. She drifted closer, put her hands on his shoulders and looked into his eyes, soundlessly speaking to him, while he was too dazed to move; and her expression was so gentle and so concerned there seemed no threat in her. Her eyes were dark as her face was white, with moving shadow in their depths that might have been currents, or only a vision of the ropes and the rail of the boat as she put her cold arms about his neck and kissed him with the taste and the chill of river water on her lips.

  It lasted a long, long while. He grew dizzy and dazed, he tried to remember what she was, but nothing he had ever felt was the same as this—profound, and dangerous, and at the same time so gentle there could never be any harm, as long as he did not move—

  He drifted, then, in a dream where dangerous things moved around the both of them, but there was no harm, not so long as she was there—not so long as he looked into her eyes and not to other things.

  But she drifted away then; and he was suddenly locked in one of the sweating, heart-thumping sort of dreams which usually meant he was looking for his father. He knew that somebody was going to tell him that his father was murdered, but that was long ago and he had long since gotten used to that idea. Nowadays it was not truly his father he was looking for—though he had never known precisely what or who it was. It was the searching itself that was the nightmare, a conviction that if he could not find what he was looking for, he was damned…

  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 wan
ts 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.