Rusalka (v1.3)

by C. J. Cherryh

  Sasha drew a deep breath, clenched his fists and told himself master Uulamets was probably listening and taking what he said into account even if he gave no sign of it.

  Eveshka hardly seemed to think so. Eveshka was angry. He felt it. He wished her not to wish anything for a while… “Please,” he said aloud as he walked away and left Uulamets in peace. “Pyetr and I are tired. Please. Not now.”

  He felt a shiver in the air—impatience, fear, anger. Always the anger. She was weaker, and that could only go so far—

  I can’t die, she insisted he know, terrified; and other thoughts that kept bobbing up in his mind—

  Murder. Anger and hurt—half-crazed and hungry and half-killed by her father’s wanting her to be different than she was… that was what had killed her. All her life she had fought just to be Eveshka, while her father was trying to wish Eveshka to be something else… and she wanted him to stop it, stop it, stop it—she wanted him dead—

  “Shut up!” he yelled at her, and the whole woods seemed hushed, Uulamets and Pyetr both looking at him in startlement, while he stood in the middle of the clearing with his fists clenched. “Shut up, I did what you want, I killed my father and I killed my mother, and you don’t know what you’re talking about! I do, so shut up!”

  And while Uulamets was looking his way in shock, while he had the old man’s attention and Pyetr’s, he plunged ahead with the rest of what she had set boiling in him, which he had no certainty he could ever remember in cold blood—

  “You,” he said, pointing at Uulamets, and wanting his attention as Eveshka wanted Uulamets to know what he had to say, “you drove your daughter away, every day you wished she was exactly what you wanted—”

  “That’s not so,” Uulamets said. “That’s not so. I gave her every opportunity…”

  “As long as you thought she was right. What if she just wanted—”

  “Was Kavi Chernevog right?” Uulamets stood up, wild-haired, wild-eyed, and turned on Eveshka. “Was it your wishes got you here, girl? Was what you wanted so wise?”

  Eveshka dimmed and retreated.

  “Young folk,” Uulamets said, “have such potent wishes, and so damned little brains to make them doubt what they’re doing—”

  “Old ones,” Pyetr said, from his seat on an old log, “get so damned self-centered.” Uulamets rounded on him and Pyetr said, “Turn me into a toad, why don’t you?” with Uulamets so furious Sasha wished with everything he had that Uulamets would not take that suggestion, but Pyetr kept right on going: “—because you haven’t done so well either, grandfather, or our boat wouldn’t be stuck in sand in the river, and we wouldn’t have had to track you days through the rain and the muck in this woods to rescue you from your own damned foolishness!—And you—” he said, with a look at Eveshka—

  The raven screamed from its perch on a limb and made a sudden dive at Pyetr’s face. Pyetr flung up his arms and Sasha flung out an angry wish to drive it away, but quick as he could think it was already kiting skyward, and blood was welling up in a scratch on Pyetr’s wrist.

  While Babi, a suddenly very much larger and more ominous Babi, was growling and hissing and bristling about the shoulders, not at Pyetr, as seemed, but looking up after the raven.

  So was Uulamets looking skyward, frowning as the raven came back to sit in the top of a tree.

  Sasha said, “Remember what I told you, master Uulamets? I’ll remember everything you do. And I don’t need you so much as I did.”

  Uulamets turned, wild of eye, finger trembling as he pointed at him. “Now there’s a fool! Don’t need me, do you? You’re going to walk out of here, hike down to Kiev, you and your friend and my daughter, and make your fortune in the streets. Of course you are!—Fool! You can’t get him free of her, you can’t get him free of yourself’, there’s his difficulty! There’s no family for a wizard, there’s no friend, there’s no daughter either. Take a lesson from me! I brought up a wizard-child, I let her grow the way a weed grows, without wishing more than her safety and her good sense, and that, it seems, was unfatherly neglect. When she got to a reasonable age and took to selfish wishes she didn’t want me to know about, we had discussions, oh, indeed we had discussions, boy, about wisdom and self-restraint and consequences—lessons you apparently learned by native wit and my own offspring abjectly failed to learn from my teaching, because my daughter was far more concerned with being a weed—and, like a weed, going her own way and getting what she wanted, having everything I forbade her to touch! My daughter grew up a fool, boy, against every principle I tried to teach her—because of course I was wishing her to learn, and wishing her to use good sense—”

  “Your good sense!” Eveshka cried, drifting into the way of things. “What about mine?”

  “Oh, indeed! Is there a mine and thine to good sense? There’s one good sense, daughter, and if I have it and you don’t, then you’d do well to listen and do what you’re told!”

  “And what if you’re the one who’s wrong? Pyetr’s right! You’re not doing so well, papa! You wouldn’t listen to me, you didn’t want me back, you took that thing in my place and let it sleep in my bed and you treated it the way you never did treat me, because I wouldn’t put up with your nonsense—”

  “One hopes his daughter grows! One hopes his daughter learns something after all these years!”

  “Everybody shut up!” Pyetr shouted, and quietly then, from his log, elbows on knees: “Does it occur to anyone that maybe something’s wanting us to act like fools, the way something wanted that sail to rip, and maybe it’s not having a real hard go of it, considering what it’s got to work with.”

  It certainly made sense. “Pyetr’s got a point,” Sasha said before Uulamets could say anything. “We felt the River-thing out there. It’s somewhere around here. And if that’s what’s happening, maybe we ought to trust Pyetr’s sense about it—being as he’s not magical, and it’s harder for it to confuse him, isn’t that what you told me?”

  Uulamets gnawed his lip and cast a narrow glance at Pyetr.

  “I’d advise,” Pyetr said, “we get back to the boat, but Sasha says we’ll never make it that far, so what are we going to do? Go on believing the River-thing who told us this was a good idea? Or just salt it down once for all and see if that doesn’t improve our luck.”

  “You can’t kill a magical creature,” Uulamets said in a preoccupied way, and walked off to the log where he had been sitting.

  “What—?” Pyetr started to say, but: “Shut up!” Uulamets hissed, and went and picked up his book from the log, sat down and started leafing through it.

  “More magic,” Pyetr said, and looked at Sasha. “I hope he’s got a way to wish us out of this. Maybe if you and he and Eveshka got together on what you wanted—”

  “You can wish a rock to fall,” Uulamets snarled, turning pages. “You can wish a man to rise. But you won’t wish either to fly, and you won’t wish a force of nature not to exist, not if you have any sense.”

  “So what would happen?”

  “That depends.”

  “On what?”

  “On strength and intent. Shut up! You’d try a stone’s patience.”

  “I want to know,” Pyetr said in a low voice, looking back at Sasha, “how if you can’t wish what can’t happen—what we just buried back there could be walking around and calling him papa.”

  Eveshka vanished, just shredded like smoke and whipped away across the clearing to take shape again with her back to them.

  “I don’t know the answer,” Sasha said under his breath.

  “I didn’t mean to upset her. But that thing’s damned scary. How do we even know the old man’s what he seems to be?”

  Pyetr always had had a knack for scary questions. Sasha cast a look over at Uulamets and wished hard, that being all he could think of, to see the truth about him. All he saw was a bony, frightened old man with a book that preserved the things he had done or thought of doing, but which would tell him very little about the thi
ngs he had never thought of at all.

  Unless one could think like Pyetr—just throw down the walls of what was scary and what was dangerous and ask questions like that.

  Why? Why not? And, Why won’t it?

  Actually, Sasha thought, trying to answer Pyetr’s questions for himself—I don’t know why we can’t wish ourselves out of this.

  Why not?

  Why not all try it?

  Master Uulamets thinks it’s dangerous. Why? Because he’s never tried it? Because none of us really can agree what we want? Why did he answer that by talking about nature?

  If you wish a fire not to burn, some other force of nature has to move in a rainstorm. If you wish a stone to fly, some force of nature has to move in and lift it.

  If you want a bone to live and move—nature doesn’t want to do that. At least in Vojvoda it wouldn’t, Pyetr’s absolutely right.

  But there are things that don’t come to Vojvoda.

  Why not?

  Because ordinary people are hard to magic?

  Because working with all those people that can’t be magicked is like lifting a lot of rocks, all the time?

  He wished Eveshka would not be angry at Pyetr, and that she would tell him what she knew about magic.

  Maybe, he thought, his thinking was Eveshka answering him.

  What did we bury? he wondered suddenly, and went, ignoring Pyetr’s startled, “Where are you going?” to see the place where they had buried the skull.

  Pyetr caught up to him as he reached the spot. And there was no mound, just a hole.

  “God,” Pyetr said, and hastily looked around them.

  “I don’t know what it was,” Sasha said, “but it wasn’t dead. Size doesn’t mean a thing to a vodyanoi. Shape doesn’t either. We’ve seen that.”

  “Why didn’t it kill us?” Pyetr asked. “It had a hundred chances.”

  “Something wants us here,” Sasha said uncomfortably. “I think you’re absolutely right about that.”

  “Eveshka knew what this thing was,” Pyetr said angrily. “She killed it—”

  “Not killed.”

  “Whatever she did to it—she’s a wizard, isn’t she? She has to know more than we do, doesn’t she? She could have said, ‘Pyetr and Sasha, don’t touch that thing, it’s not dead!’ She might have said, I’m just not sure about that,’ she might have said, ‘Don’t waste your time burying it, it’ll just leave when you’re not looking.’”

  A cold thought came to him. “Why didn’t Babi growl at it? Babi’s your friend.”

  “Babi’s her dog,” Pyetr said in a subdued voice. “Or whatever. Babi didn’t go close to it. And grandfather, for that matter—didn’t open his mouth. He’s the chief wizard around here, isn’t he? So why didn’t he tell us?”

  “Master Uulamets isn’t doing very well,” Sasha said, feeling his stomach increasingly upset. “And I don’t know why she didn’t tell us. I don’t know why she disappeared for a moment on the trail, or why the vodyanoi kept coming and going. I don’t know why she’s acting the way she is, but she’s upset at her father and she’s not—”

  He lost whatever he had been going to say. It just dropped out of his mind.

  And again something dropped out.

  That scared him, and he wished he could remember what it was.

  “I’m being absent-minded,” he said, and lost touch with the forest around him for a moment. He wished not to, and made himself look around. “We’re in trouble.”

  “God,” Pyetr muttered, and shook at his shoulder. “Are you all right?”

  “I don’t know. I don’t like what’s going on.” He looked up at the ridge, and into the trees around them, and he took Pyetr’s arm and drew him back into the clearing where Uulamets and Eveshka were.

  “Eveshka,” he said, quietly, so as not to disturb her father. “We want to talk to you.”

  She slipped away into the woods, pale and silent, not quite out of sight, but not talking to them about what was not in that small grave either.

  CHAPTER 24

  NOBODY TALKED about doing anything. “Are we going back to the boat?” Pyetr asked Sasha, who at least was talking to him; and: “I don’t think so,” Sasha said.

  The next reasonable question: “What are we going to do?”

  “I don’t know,” Sasha said, managing not to look him quite in the eye.

  The third: “Is everybody waiting on grandfather to make up his mind? Or is it perchance the vodyanoi we’re waiting for?”

  “Grandfather’s thinking,” Sasha said.

  Pyetr muttered his succinct opinion, got into their supplies and had himself a drink, had himself two, for good measure, after which he came at least to the temporary philosophical conclusion that he was doomed, everyone was bent on a course that was assuredly going to kill them all, and if no one else wanted to take the trouble to hike back to the boat, damned if he wanted to make a pointless, exhausting trek.

  At least, in a more practical vein, they could rest, eat, bandage blisters and mend rips and such against such time as it might please grandfather to think about going back to the boat and back to the house to reconsider this whole mad venture.

  So Eveshka drifted in and out amongst the trees, grandfather read his book and the god knew what stalked them in the brush while the sun passed noon, afternoon, and it got on toward dark.

  By then he had patched the knee of his breeches, cut a binding for a split in the side of his left boot, and had another sullen dispute with Sasha over nothing more substantial than how much water ought to be in the stew; after which he felt disgusted with himself, so he had another drink after supper. Then he sat down with his sword braced between his shoulder and his boot, using a whetstone to renew the much-abused edge, a small, steely sound—at least the hope occurred to him—to remind any Thing out there in the brushy dark beyond their fire that here was both steel and salt, and a man in no good temper.

  Grandfather read even while he ate; Eveshka stayed to the edges of the firelight, evading questions; Sasha let the supper dishes lie and took to making notches in a stick he had peeled, which Pyetr took at first to be some sort of rustic pothook, if they had had a pot: certainly Sasha seemed quite purposeful about where he bored little holes and cut little lines.

  “Bear?” Pyetr asked, after a while, thinking he saw a face developing. “No,” Sasha said without looking at him.

  A man could feel unwelcome at this rate.

  He looked glumly out at Eveshka, wondering was it only him or whether the whole world was out of joint this evening—not that he wanted Eveshka’s attention, the god knew, although…

  Eveshka did at least seem to care about him.

  The whetstone slipped. He nicked his finger and quickly carried it to his mouth, wincing, while he watched that shimmer of mist, and saw her watching him.

  “Deep?” Sasha asked him, meaning his cut finger. He looked at it. It was in a painful spot, on the inside of his thumb—on the hand the vodyanoi had gotten, the same one the damned raven had scratched.

  “No,” he said, sullenly, shaking it. “What’s one more?”

  “Here, let me see it.”

  “No.” He put the wound to his mouth, shook it again after, and applied a little vodka to the cut, applied a swallow to his stomach, and then a second one, casting a foul look at Uulamets.

  “Old man,” he began at last.

  “Hush,” Uulamets snapped.

  “Grandfather—” Pyetr persisted, doggedly, grimly polite, but Sasha signaled him no, not to bother Uulamets.

  One supposed by that, that Uulamets was making some progress. It certainly did not look that way to him.

  “So what are we going to do?” Pyetr said. “The vodyanoi lied, grandfather, it’s lied from the start. It says you have to find this Kavi—”

  “Shut up, fool!”

  He gave Uulamets’ turned shoulder a long, cold stare, thinking of things he had done in Vojvoda he was ashamed of, considering how much more this old man
deserved them. Poor old Yurishev, for one, had spitted him mostly by accident—he had no grudge for that: indeed he had never even drawn his sword against the old man, nor thought of it at the time, not being the sort who would readily think of violence against a man three and more times his age—

  Until lately.

  “Pyetr,” Sasha said quietly, at his elbow, “don’t, please don’t quarrel with him. He didn’t mean it. He’s trying to think.”

  “Good,” Pyetr said. “About time.” He stopped the jug and set it down. “Trust the vodyanoi, why don’t we? It swears on its name, doesn’t it? We trek into this woods after one of his old—”

  “Shut up!” Uulamets said, and as Pyetr looked around at him: “It couldn’t lie. Not on its own.”

  There must be something magical going on, Pyetr thought: he could see the old man talking, see the sweat glistening on Uulamets’ forehead, but his voice sounded distant, like listening through water.

  “We’re in serious difficulty,” Uulamets said. “Are you listening to me? I’ve been trying to draw our shadow in. It’s not reliable, nothing it says is reliable, but it does have very much to do with my daughter’s life. We have no choice, you least of all, Pyetr Illitch. I suppose I owe you some small debt—”

  “Small!” Pyetr cried.

  “—which I will pay,” Uulamets snapped, “with your life so far as I can save it! But my daughter’s life is ultimately all that will save any of us. You know names. Don’t speak them again. Don’t ask me my intentions. Do as I tell you and don’t follow impulses that seem strange and dangerous to you: I cannot personally conceive how you see magical things and I don’t know how else to warn you. You’re both more difficult and more vulnerable a target. You must do what we tell you, because your own opinions are not reliable, do you understand me? Do you understand me, Pyetr Illitch?”

  Pyetr worked on that thought, unpalatable as it was, and looked into the old man’s eyes with the suspicion, no, the sure knowledge—that the old man insisted he. say yes, and that that was the feeling thick in the air. “Sasha,” he said, desperately trying to resist it. “Sasha—”