The Breathing Sea II - Drowning

by E. P. Clark

  “Give me your sums, and I’ll add them for you,” Dasha said.

  Writing down the expenditures was a more complicated task than Dasha would have guessed, as Aunty Raisa kept forgetting to put something in, and then going back and telling Dasha to add it, and then forgetting that she had done that and doing it again and then having the same thing put down twice, but after another—extremely long—couple of versts, Dasha was as confident as she could be that everything had been put down and added up properly.

  “Show me, then, girl,” Aunty Raisa commanded.

  Dasha handed her the piece of birch bark she had used. It was not the best writing material, and the ink was not the best ink, and her lap while sitting in a moving cart was not the best writing surface, so she was not surprised when Aunty Raisa squinted at it as if confounded.

  “That’s a fine hand you’ve got there,” Aunty Raisa said after a while. “That’s a mighty fine hand. Like a proper princess’s. How’d you get such a fine hand, girl?”

  “My tutors taught me,” Dasha told her.

  “Yes, but how?” demanded Aunty Raisa.

  “Just like I’ve been teaching the girls,” Dasha told her.

  “That foolery?! You’re lying, girl! No one learns their letters like that!”

  “I did,” Dasha told her. “It’s how they teach in Krasnograd.” At least that was how the tutors of the very highest nobility taught, but Dasha didn’t add that part.

  Aunty Raisa sniffed and shook her head in disbelief. “No,” she said. “You’ve got some strange gift, girl, anyone can see it. Our girls will never write like that.”

  “I don’t have any kind of strange gift—or rather, not for writing with a clear hand,” Dasha told her. “It took me at least as long as any other girl, and lots of other girls were better at it than I was. Some of the other girls I know can do illuminated scrolls, and everything. I just…” But Aunty Raisa was already shaking her head again, and Dasha was unable to convince her that she had only been a mediocre pupil when it came to writing and drawing, and that everything she had accomplished had been entirely due to many days spent on the “foolery” that Aunty Raisa was convinced was a waste of time.

  “There’s no point in you working any more with our girls, that’s plain enough,” Aunty Raisa decided. “They’re never going to learn anything anyway. Neither of ‘em has ever had a head for learning, and since their brothers died of the cough this winter, they’ve been like spring rabbits and fume-struck cats, all rolled into one. We’ve been trying to knock some sense in ‘em, but some people you just can’t teach.”

  “I’m sorry about their brothers,” said Dasha, horrified. “I didn’t know…how sorry you must all have been! What a great sorrow to fall upon your families! I lost one of my own second-sisters this winter, and even though we were never close…”

  “It happens,” said Aunty Raisa, cutting Dasha off with a shrug and a shake of her head that was meant to show that this was no great sorrow, but in fact showed quite the opposite. “It happens,” she repeated, looking off at the trees that were crawling slowly past them. “When the gods will it, there ain’t nothing we mere women can do to stop it. And now these girls are set on driving us all into the grave after ‘em with their foolery. But no matter. You tried to teach ‘em, even if you weren’t no good at it, and you can write better’n any of us. ‘Stead of teaching ‘em, you can keep our ledgers for us, as long as you don’t spoil ‘em.”

  “Ah…very well,” agreed Dasha, and then had to go clean up the back of the cart, where Lisochka and Allochka had been merrily shredding the excess birch bark and tossing it about, as if they were girls of three, not twelve.

  Even though she was freed of her teaching duties, the rest of the day was hardly any less irksome for Dasha. At least with the teaching, as little progress as her charges had been making, she had had something to occupy her mind. But the only thing occupying Dasha’s mind for the afternoon, as they plodded along at a pace that, Aunty Raisa’s earlier concerns notwithstanding, in no way taxed Pyatnyshki’s abilities, was how vexingly foolish her companions were. Aunty Raisa and Aunty Naina seemed absolutely determined to make their daughters fail, and despite their admiration for Dasha’s very second-rate abilities in the spheres of sums and letters, were equally determined not to believe her honest explanations of how she had acquired them. Furthermore, Lisochka and Allochka seemed determined to outdo each other and the rest of Zem’ in giggling, squealing, and shrieking, as well as pinching, slapping, and hair-pulling, so that by midafternoon, Dasha had a sharp pain over her left eye that she could not dispel, no matter what she tried.

  “You never acted like this, I’ll wager,” Aunty Raisa said to her at one point, after delivering a stinging slap to Allochka’s buttocks when the latter took it into her head to try hanging off the side of the cart.

  “Well…no,” Dasha admitted. Surely she hadn’t? No, thinking about it now, she could see that she had been giddy and foolish at that age, but she had never been as impudent and wild as this.

  “Your mother must’ve been strict, then,” said Aunty Raisa, giving Allochka a cuff to the back of her head as she climbed back into the cart, just for good measure. “She must’ve beaten you a lot.”

  “Ah…no,” Dasha told her. She had never been beaten, and…had her mother been strict? By Aunty Raisa’s standards she had not, and yet…she had been, hadn’t she? Dasha tried to imagine what would have happened if she had carried on like Lisochka and Allochka, and failed. It simply had not been possible. She had been attended and watched over for every moment of every day of her entire life, and at the slightest show of misbehavior had been whisked off to her chambers until she had been in a fit state to be seen in public again. Which was perhaps why her father thought it would do her good to leave home for a while? So that she could be wild and rebellious?

  I hope he likes how that’s worked out, Dasha thought sourly, and caught Lisochka’s arm before she fell out of the cart, and tried to ignore the loud admonitions Aunty Naina sent Lisochka’s way from the other cart.

  By the time they arrived at their intended waystation that evening, Dasha was sure she had never been so glad to reach the end of a day’s journey, not when she had been soaked and starving, not even when she had come stumbling out of the woods with a wolf at her heels. Her current companions, for all the tremendous favor that they were doing her, were, she was sure, the most unpleasant people she had ever met in her entire life, and perhaps the most unpleasant people in all the Known World. And the worst part was that they created most of their unpleasantness themselves, of their own free will. Aunty Naina and Aunty Raisa quarreled almost constantly with their daughters, whom (when they weren’t quarreling with them) they claimed were the apples of their eyes. They were always shouting at them for being too loud, hitting them for being too rowdy and violent, and carping at them for being too critical, when, that is, they were not loudly lamenting their incessant whining, or complaining of their empty-headedness one moment and forgetting what they were complaining of the next. Aunty Naina and Aunty Raisa might have good hearts, or at least be capable of occasional acts of kindness, as their treatment of Dasha proved, but they seemed to have no center, nothing to hold them together and keep them on a steady course, no standard to which they might hold themselves. They said and did whatever the impulse of the moment dictated, and showed no inclination towards reflection on their past actions, or contemplation of how that might guide their future ones. It was a wonder, Dasha thought to herself, that they had survived as long as they had. And these women thought they could and should lecture her! But it was clear that dissuading them from that notion would be very difficult indeed, and since, Dasha devoutly hoped, their association would be of very short duration, not worth the effort.

  “How much farther to Lesnograd?” Dasha asked as they climbed out of their carts and onto the waystation yard.

  “Another two days, maybe? Two days at least,” Aunty Raisa told her.

&nbs
p; “That’s not far at all, then,” Dasha said, hoping that her face hadn’t visibly fallen at the information. She had been fantasizing to herself that the journey would be over tomorrow morning, unlikely as she knew that to be, given the pace at which they had been traveling.

  “Far enough,” said Aunty Raisa, and went off to make arrangements for their night’s stay.

  ***

  The waystation was clean and comfortable, and its mistress was much more polite to their party than anyone had been to Dasha when she had been traveling by herself. The innkeeper, who introduced herself as Aunty Liza, was good friends with Aunty Naina and Aunty Raisa, and they spent as much of the evening as she could spare from her other customers chatting and gossiping. She shook her head over Lisochka and Allochka’s antics, and appeared impressed all out of proportion by Dasha’s abilities at writing and drawing—they all pressed her to draw, once they discovered that she had been taught to do that as well—when Dasha was forced to demonstrate them.

  “My, that’s a fine, clear hand you’ve got there,” she said, admiring the rather plain row of words that Dasha had set down on a coarse piece of paper, at their request. “How’d you learn to write like that? Were your mother in service to some great noblewoman, an’ they trained you along with her daughters?”

  “Something like that,” said Dasha.

  Aunty Liza marveled over it, remarking over and over again in exactly the same terms on its clarity and beauty, until someone on the other side of the room called for more beer, and she hurried off, much to Dasha’s relief.

  “What’re you going to do when you get to Lesnogorod?” Aunty Naina then asked Dasha. “You should get work as a scribe, you should. There’s lots of merchants as’d pay well for your abilities. An’ it’s a good life, merchanting. Well, better’n some, ‘specially if you get a good mistress. You’re a soft young thing, anyone can see that, but if you had a good mistress, one who’d treat you right, you’d do all right, an’ you’d never be poor an’ hungry again. We could set you up with someone, we could. Don’t you think, Raisochka? We could set her up with Aunty Vera, her as lives across from the Haymarket an’ sells tea…”

  “I think I will go to my family,” Dasha interjected, but neither of them listened to her, and by the time they retired for the night, it had been firmly decided, in their own minds at least, that Dasha would apprentice with Aunty Vera who sold tea and herbs, and not even Dasha’s explicit request to be dropped off at the Lesnograd kremlin could dissuade them from their plan. The best Dasha could do was extract the information from them that the Haymarket was not too far from the kremlin, which gave her the hope of slipping off and making her way to her actual destination once they left her with Aunty Vera. And perhaps Aunty Vera would recognize her as kin to Aunty Olga? Or so she could hope.

  ***

  Lisochka and Allochka complained strenuously of fatigue following supper, and threw themselves onto the bed they were once again sharing with Dasha—Aunty Naina and Aunty Raisa had, with suspicious glee, arranged for a separate chamber for themselves, just as they had the night before, and Dasha couldn’t help but think that a significant part of her service to them was spending the night with the girls, so that they didn’t have to—with loud protestations of their exhaustion, which was, they claimed, so severe that they were unable even to clean their teeth. And indeed, they were very shortly asleep, curled up together like puppies. Unfortunately, by the time Dasha had cleaned her teeth and untied her hair and changed into the nightgown that she had been so grossly overcharged—she now thought—for, they woke back up, as refreshed as if they had slept the entire night through. So Dasha spent another wakeful night listening to their gossiping and giggling, and then had to drag them out of bed again the next morning. Wary of being scolded again for lateness, she jumped out of bed as soon as it was light enough not to need a lantern, and shook, prodded, and splashed Lisochka and Allochka until they got up, moaning and whining, too.

  “If you went to bed at a proper time, instead of sitting up half the night and keeping other people up as well, you wouldn’t have such a hard time getting up in the morning,” Dasha told them severely.

  Allochka stuck her tongue out at her. Dasha was sorely tempted to reach out and slap her face, or possibly grab her tongue and pinch it until she begged for mercy.

  “Why are you acting like a girl of three?” she asked instead. “Soon you’ll be a woman grown. Your moonblood will come soon; do you really want still to be playing the fool when that happens?”

  “It’s already come,” Allochka told her defiantly. “This winter. And Lisochka’s came last month. So there!” They both stuck their tongues out at her.

  “Which means you could be mothers soon!” Dasha told them. “Is this how mothers behave?”

  Rather than sobering the girls up with this serious thought, though, her words only caused them to fall into a fit of giggles that lasted all the way down the stairs and over to the bench where Aunty Naina and Aunty Raisa were already sitting, the first people down for breakfast. Their food had not yet arrived, however, and they nodded at Dasha and the girls in greeting, rather than scolding them for lateness, filling Dasha with the glow of success. But why? Why should she be so set on pleasing these people, or care whether or not their unspoken and often capricious demands were fulfilled? She only had two more days—a long, long two days, tfoo!—in their company, and then she would part with them, hopefully forever. She just had to survive these next two days. Aunty Liza came over to inform them that breakfast this morning would be wheat porridge, which caused Lisochka and Allochka to break into loud moans and groans. Dasha rubbed her suddenly-aching forehead. Somehow she would have to survive these next two days.

  “There’s someone at the door,” Aunty Liza announced, cocking her head at the entrance. “Funny time for guests to be coming.” She left them to go hurrying over to the door, but before she could reach it, it was flung open from the outside. Dasha’s father came bursting in, followed closely by the rest of the party.

  Chapter Seven

  For a moment Dasha froze. Aunty Liza was saying something, something about how there was no need to go slamming and banging her doors, she was perfectly capable of opening them for her guests herself, but Oleg only glanced at her for an instant before looking around the nearly empty main room. His eyes fell on Dasha. His mouth, part of her was amused to note, actually dropped open in surprise.

  “Dasha!” he cried, recovering himself. “Dasha, there you are! You’re all right!”

  Dasha stood up slowly and, pushing awkwardly past Lisochka and Allochka, who were hemming her in on the bench, began making her way over to him. She was unsure what to say, and rather afraid that he was about to begin shouting at her, casting accusations at her, throwing some kind of a fit, or generally doing something unpleasant. But instead he ran over to her and threw his arms around her, hugging her till she nearly choked.

  “I thought you’d died,” he told her, hugging her and shaking her at the same time. “I thought you’d died, I thought you’d died, I thought you’d died!”

  “I didn’t,” Dasha told him, which was all she could trust herself to say. His obvious joy at finding her alive and well was not, as she might have imagined, filling her with equal joy, but was rather reminding her of all the times when he’d irritated her, teased her, criticized her, or even worse, avoided her for months and years at a time entirely. Here he was, almost crying with joy at seeing her after being separated for a matter of days, when he’d been perfectly fine with being separated from her for the better part of her entire childhood. How dare he..! “I didn’t die,” she told him. “I’m perfectly well, in fact.”

  He held her out and looked her up and down. “You’re not fine,” he said. “You look a mess, Dasha. What happened to you?” His face darkened. “Why did you run off?” he demanded. “First from us, and then from the domoviye? Why did you run off? Do you have any idea how much trouble you’ve caused?!” Now he was shouting. “Do
you have any idea how worried I’ve been, how much suffering you’ve caused?!”

  “However much it was, it wasn’t enough!” Dasha shouted at him. He dropped his hands from her shoulders and stepped back, looking as if she’d slapped him. “You’ve been running away from me my entire life, and you have the gall, the nerve, to complain about my behavior?! What gives you the right to complain? What gives you the right to criticize me? What gives you the right to care at all?! You’ve never cared a single grosh about me before; why should you care now? Why should I waste even a single moment caring about your troubles, when you’ve never cared about mine?!”

  “That’s not true,” he said. “I cared…I just had to…”

  “Well maybe I cared too, but I also just had to!” Dasha cried, before he could explain what it was that he had had to do.

  “That’s different,” he said, drawing himself up tall. “I had my duty.”

  “And I had mine! I had my duty to leave those who would keep me a little girl, and go off so that I could become a woman! I had my duty to leave those who would seek to make me into what they wanted me to be, not what I needed to become! One day I’ll be Tsarina, and then it will be my duty to make things better, and I won’t be able to do that if I’m nothing more than a pale copy of other people’s thoughts and desires, which is all I’ll ever be if I don’t ever go off on my own and stand on my own two feet! I have to become myself first, if I’m ever to be able to do anything for anyone else.”

  “And you think you’ll do this by running away?” he demanded.

  “Well, it seemed to work for you,” she snapped.

  For a long moment he just stood there, chest heaving, looking like he wanted to scream, or hit her, or burst into tears. Everyone around them was frozen as well, unable to speak or move. With sudden clarity, Dasha could see that neither he nor anyone else had the strength or the courage to fix this. Only she could do that. Only she could make things better, just as she had said she wanted to do.