The Breathing Sea II - Drowning

by E. P. Clark

  “Lesnogorod? A hundred versts, more or less.”

  Dasha’s heart sank. On Poloska she could have covered the distance in two days, or one day if the road and the weather favored her and she really wanted the ride to be over with. But on Pyatnyshki it could easily take another four days at least. And she had just agreed to hand over the last of her coin. But starving and shivering the night away wouldn’t get them any closer to Lesnograd either.

  “Is that where you’re going?” the girl asked. “Alone?”

  “I was separated from my companions,” Dasha explained, yet again. “I decided to carry on to my kin in Lesnograd. If my father comes looking for me, please tell him so.”

  “You’ll be lucky to make half the distance on this old nag,” the girl told her, giving Pyatnyshki a disparaging look.

  “She’s gotten me this far,” Dasha said. “Treat her kindly, if you please. She deserves it.”

  The girl sniffed at that, but led Pyatnyshki off gently enough, and was even, Dasha noticed, scratching her neck by the time they reached the stable. Reassured by this, Dasha stepped into the main room of the inn.

  “Stop right there!” a voice cried out as soon as she came through the door. “Don’t drip on my dry floors! Go change in the bathhouse first!”

  “These are the only clothes I have,” Dasha shouted back at the woman who was standing behind the bar on the far side of the room.

  The woman grunted in disapproval at that, but, after a moment, decided to leave her place behind the bar and make the trek over to Dasha. “What happened to you? Were you robbed?” she demanded. “Are you traveling alone?”

  “I am traveling alone,” Dasha told her. “But I wasn’t robbed. I was just separated from my companions.”

  The woman grunted again. “Separated? You shouldn’t be so careless. The gods alone know what might happen to a girl like you, traveling alone.” She squinted at Dasha. “Either you’re a noblewoman, or a noblewoman’s maid,” she said. “Which is it? Did you run away from your mother, or your mistress?”

  “Ah…” said Dasha. “The former. Only I didn’t run away.” Which was not entirely true, but the woman didn’t need to know that.

  “‘Course you didn’t,” said the woman, giving her a sharp look. “Am I going to get into trouble for letting you stay the night?”

  “No,” Dasha assured her. “Quite the opposite.”

  “You got the coin to pay for it?”

  Dasha handed over the seventy grosh. The woman eyed her up and down, and then said with a sigh, “For another ten grosh you can use the bathhouse, and I’ll throw in one of my old nightgowns. For free. You can wear it while you let your things dry. ‘Course, they’re not going to dry completely, but you might not be quite such a drowned rat in the morning if we hang ‘em up for the night.”

  “Thank you,” Dasha told her, handing over the last coin in her purse. She felt a sick thrill of fear as she did so. Now she was truly poor, without a grosh to her name, and another hundred versts to cover before she would find help. Or maybe help would find her in the morning.

  “Don’t thank me till you’ve seen it,” the woman told her. “You might rather go naked, but it’ll keep you warm, well, warmer than nothing would. Wait here. I’ll go get it, and some towels too, and then you go straight to the bathhouse, and don’t come back till you’ve steamed and dried off.”

  The woman returned in short order with two very threadbare towels that were more like worn dishtowels, and a nightgown that appeared to be considerably older than Dasha herself.

  “It ain’t fine, but it’s clean, so don’t go turning your nose up at it,” the woman told her, shoving it into Dasha’s hands. “Now go, and don’t come back till you’re done.”

  Dasha entered the bathhouse with extreme trepidation, expecting domoviye to come leaping out at her at any moment, but she had hardly stepped into the steam chamber before she was joined by two other girls, both no older than twelve, who giggled and wrestled and play-fought so loudly that anything lurking in the shadows was forced to remain there. The girls were soon followed by their mothers, who, it turned out, were trading partners and were riding up to Lesnograd together.

  “Ride with us tomorrow,” one of the women, who had introduced herself as Aunty Naina, urged Dasha. “It’s always jollier together, and a girl like you shouldn’t be traveling alone.”

  “I don’t have any coin left,” Dasha confessed. “I won’t be able to stay at waystations after tonight.”

  Aunty Naina traded a glance with Aunty Raisa, the other merchant. “Maybe we can work something out,” said Aunty Naina. “A nice, fair-spoken girl like you, I’m sure you know lots of things. Do you know your sums and letters?”

  “A bit,” said Dasha.

  Aunty Naina tsked. “A girl like you should know more than ‘a bit,’” she told Dasha. “Your mother has an estate you’ll be inheriting one day, my head for beheading. I’m right, ain’t I?”

  “Ah…yes,” Dasha admitted. “And I know my sums and letters pretty well.”

  Aunty Naina laughed. “That’s more like it! Can you write with a clear hand?”

  Dasha hesitated. Her tutors had always chided her for her inelegant writing. But then again, they could always read it, couldn’t they? “Clear enough,” she answered.

  “Good enough,” said Aunty Naina. “Lisochka—Alisa, that is—she’s mine—and Allochka here—she’s Aunty Raisa’s—need to do their lessons, but we’ve no time for teaching ‘em, and they’re too wild and hardheaded by half for us to be breaking our heads over ‘em every day anyway. You teach ‘em while we’re on the road, and we’ll put you up. Sound fair?”

  “Yes, thank you!” Dasha told her fervently.

  “Well, good, then. We’d hate to see anything happen to you.” Aunty Naina gave her a friendly pat on the hand. “Now let’s get out of here before we steam to death, and go have some supper. Lisochka, Allochka, stop horsing around like wild things and go rinse off and put your clothes on.” She shook her head as Lisochka and Allochka responded to her command by rolling around on the bathhouse floor, shrieking and giggling. “I’ll wager you were never this wild, were you?” she asked Dasha.

  “Not exactly,” Dasha told her.

  “Your mother was strict with you, then? Didn’t let you get up to any foolery?”

  “Something like that,” Dasha said.

  “You had nannies and tutors as well, to keep you in line, I’ll wager?”

  “Lots,” Dasha told her.

  Aunty Naina sighed. “Must be nice,” she said. “Well, you’ll be our nanny and tutor for a few days, and get a taste of your own medicine, and maybe knock some sense into these girls. Lisochka! I won’t tell you again! Stop playing the fool and go get dressed!”

  Even a few days as these girls’ tutor was likely to be a very long time, Dasha thought, as they all left the steam chamber and began drying and dressing themselves. But she still couldn’t deny that meeting them had been an incredible stroke of fortune anyway. Perhaps the gods really were watching out for her. Or perhaps fortune happened to those who put themselves in its way? In either case, by next week she should be in Lesnograd with Aunty Olga, and whatever happened in the intervening days, she could survive. Allochka pulled Dasha’s hair and shrieked with laughter. Well, maybe she could survive.

  Chapter Six

  Dasha found herself put in the same chamber as Lisochka and Allochka that night, so that, as Aunty Naina said, “They could all become good friends and have a jolly time.” This mostly involved the two younger girls sitting up half the night and giggling over things that Dasha was certain she had never found funny, not even when she was at the giddy and foolish age of twelve summers.

  Worse than that, the next morning all three of them were too tired to want to get out of bed, even though Dasha had not joined in on the giggling and gossiping at all. She told this to Lisochka and Allochka when they began moaning and complaining about having to get up, but this only made them w
hine with redoubled force, and Dasha finally had to stoop to snatching the blanket off them and splashing water in their faces to make them rise. And when she did get them downstairs for breakfast, Aunty Naina and Aunty Raisa were already halfway finished, and complained about their lateness, even though they were one of the first ones downstairs, and no mention had been made the night before of setting off particularly early.

  “You’ll have to learn how to manage them, my dear,” Aunty Naina told her, in a tone that was meant to be friendly, but was actually intensely annoying.

  “Just wait till you have a few of your own,” said Aunty Raisa, as if that were supposed to be some kind of inducement to motherhood.

  Feeling both irritated and chastened, Dasha followed them out of the main room and onto the yard, where their horses were already harnessed and Pyatnyshki had already been tied to Aunty Raisa’s cart.

  “Oh, thank the gods, I thought we were never going to get out of there,” said Aunty Raisa. “Hurry and get in before we waste any more time.”

  “Do you normally set off very early, then?” Dasha asked, climbing into the cart with her and the girls.

  “Early! You call this early! Why, we wasted half the morning waiting for you girls!”

  Dasha looked up at the sky. The sun had not yet come out from behind the trees, but was still sending long slanting early-morning rays through the pines, covering the road with a cross-hatching of shadows. “I don’t think anyone else has set off yet,” Dasha ventured cautiously.

  “‘Course they hain’t! Sleeping the day away, the lazybones! Get up now!” She slapped her horses’ rumps with the reins. “Your nag’d better keep up with us,” she told Dasha. “Else we’ll have to leave her behind.”

  Several protests against this ran through Dasha’s head, but were stifled by the observation that, first of all, Aunty Raisa’s statements often seemed to have little relation to actual facts, and second of all, her own horses appeared to be no faster than Pyatnyshki. “I’m sure that won’t be necessary,” Dasha said instead.

  Aunty Raisa sniffed, and then shouted at the girls for wiggling too much and threatening to knock over the barrel of fresh-salted cucumbers that was sitting behind their bench, and then shouted at the horses for not going fast enough, and said to Dasha, in what was almost a shout, “Well, what are you waiting for, girl?! Teach ‘em.”

  “Do you have a slate?” Dasha asked.

  Aunty Raisa sniffed again. “Not one I’d lend to ‘em,” she said. “Ten to one they’d break it before they wrote their first letter.”

  Dasha had to admit the justice in that, but it made practicing sums and letters rather challenging, and Aunty Raisa appeared to have no alternative plan, or any interest in discussing one. She racked her brains for a moment, and then said, “We’ll have to gather birch bark, then, the next time we see any.”

  “What’s that?”

  “I said we’ll have to gather birch bark, the next time we see any. To practice writing on.”

  “‘Course you will; how else you going to do it?”

  Dasha looked around. The forest was all pines and spruces here. “Let’s sing a song,” she proposed to the girls.

  “You’re supposed to be teaching ‘em, not singing to ‘em!” objected Aunty Raisa. “You’re a tutor, girl, not a bard nor a wet nurse!”

  “A song to practice letters,” Dasha explained.

  Aunty Raisa humphed doubtfully at the idea, but allowed Dasha to present the idea to the two girls, who, naturally, giggled like halfwits at it, but admitted that they had never heard of such a thing.

  “It’s a way to remember your letters,” Dasha explained to them.

  “No point in wasting your time there,” Aunty Raisa interjected. “Neither of ‘em can remember one letter from another, can you, girls?”

  The girls, still giggling like halfwits, agreed. It was on the tip of Dasha’s tongue to say that even very stupid people often learned their letters, and also that it couldn’t possibly be helpful to be called stupid by their own mothers, but she amended that to, “Perhaps this will help.”

  “Perhaps,” said Aunty Raisa doubtfully. “Go on, then.”

  Dasha had, like most girls of noble birth, learned this and various other songs to help with memorizing her letters by the time she had reached seven summers, and she was therefore astonished to discover that not only did Lisochka and Allochka genuinely not know the song, but they only had a very shaky grasp of their letters in general, and could not name the entire alphabet, and certainly not in order, a situation which did not seem to trouble them in the slightest. They did both like to sing, and even had passable voices, and so after half a dozen fairly willing tries they had both learned the song tolerably well, including almost all the letters in almost the right places most of the time, but Aunty Raisa and Aunty Naina both complained that they were sick of hearing all that noise and made them stop before they had actually learned it by heart. Dasha offered to teach the girls another song, this one for learning numbers and sums, but Aunty Naina said they were driving her mad with their racket, and she was supposed to be teaching them anyway, not wasting everyone’s time with this kind of silliness. This pronouncement promptly quenched the flickering flame of enthusiasm for learning that had been lit, as fragile as the light from a wick half-drowned in wax, in the younger girls’ breasts, and they slumped on their bench in a sulk, which their mothers seemed to take as a sign that they were now ready to start learning, instead of quite the opposite.

  “All that singing,” said Aunty Raisa, shaking her head. “That’s not how proper tutors teach at all, girl,” she told Dasha. “Weren’t you ever taught anything?”

  “Yes,” said Dasha, surprised. “Of course.

  “Your tutors must’ve not known what they were doing, then, if that’s how they taught you,” said Aunty Naina.

  “They were the best tutors in Krasnograd,” said Dasha, stung into blurting that out before she could think better of it. She thought she had surely revealed too much, but Aunty Naina and Aunty Raisa both laughed and told her not to be silly, the Tsarinovna had the best tutors in Krasnograd.

  “Ah…” said Dasha.

  “Yours must’ve fooled your mother, cheated her something awful,” Aunty Naina told her. “What’d she pay ‘em, anyway?”

  “Ah…I don’t know,” said Dasha.

  Aunty Naina and Aunty Raisa both snorted together. “You see?” said Aunty Naina. “If you’d been paying attention, and learning properly, ‘stead of fooling around with songs and games, you’d know something like that.”

  “Ah…” said Dasha, once again unable to think of a response to their statements. She was saved by the appearance of a birch grove, which prompted Aunty Naina to declare it time to stop for a rest and for the girls to gather some birch bark.

  Lisochka and Allochka cheered up—perhaps a little too much—at the chance to strip bark from the birch trees, and had soon gathered several armfuls of it in their unbridled zeal. Dasha, once she discovered what they had done, sent them back to the carts with their booty, and, going over to the trees they had despoiled, placed her hands on their trunks.

  “I’m sorry,” she said quietly. “I didn’t mean for them to be quite so enthusiastic about it. I hope they didn’t damage you.”

  There was a rustling in the leaves above her. She looked up, just in time for a nut to hit her hard in the face.

  “Ouch!” she cried. There was a chittering sound, and a tiny red face, not much bigger than her thumb, looked down at her. Dasha could have sworn it was gloating.

  “What’s that?” called Aunty Raisa.

  “Just a squirrel,” Dasha called back. “She threw a nut at me!”

  “Nasty beasts,” said Aunty Raisa. “Well, don’t just stand there, come over here. We’re leaving!”

  “I don’t think you’re nasty, even if you did hit me,” Dasha told the squirrel, who cocked her tufted ears at Dasha before disappearing back into the leaves. Dasha patted the tree tr
unks again for good measure. When she pulled her hands away, she expected them to be covered in sap, but the wounds the girls had left had dried up, and looked for all the world as if they were half-healed already. A tingle ran up and down Dasha’s spine.

  “I must be imagining things,” she told herself, shaking her head and hurrying over to the carts, where Aunty Raisa had decided that, since she wanted to go and had already climbed into her seat, everyone else was slow and lazy, probably out of spite.

  The next teaching session went about as well as the first one, which was to say, not very well. The best thing that could be said about it was that they did not actually spill any of the cheap, colorless ink they were using onto their clothing or the cart, although there were several times when that was a very near thing. Dasha was unsurprised to learn that the girls, as well as having only a shaky grasp of the names of the letters and their order, could only form their shapes properly two tries out of three, and even then they were recognizable only because Dasha already knew what they had been trying to write. Dasha began teaching them another game, one in which they were supposed to imagine the letters as different plants and animals and draw them accordingly, which did raise the girls’ enthusiasm and cause them to work with great animation, and the results were, if only middling, still better than what they had been producing hitherto, but after a verst or so of this, Aunty Raisa realized what they were doing, and put a stop to it.

  “Teach them something useful, girl,” she chided Dasha. “Don’t you know how to write at all? Or is it all just this kind of foolery?”

  “I could write something for you, if you like,” Dasha offered.

  Aunty Raisa hemmed and hawed over that, but then said that Dasha could write down all her expenses from the day before. “And add up the sums too, if you can!” she told her. “Or is that all foolery for you, too?”