The Breathing Sea II - Drowning

by E. P. Clark

  “Are you having problems with Westerners up here, too?” Dasha asked. “Princess Belova…”

  “Princess Belova has been in correspondence with me,” Vladya interrupted her. “I dare say she’s told me more than she’s told you.”

  “Could I sit in with you?” Dasha asked. “My mother…”

  “Go off and see the sights,” Vladya said, before Dasha could finish her explanation. “That’s what you came here for, isn’t it?” She strode off before Dasha could object.

  “Come,” said Aunty Olga, trying and failing to look as if she weren’t irate with Vladya, and that the whole thing hadn’t been very awkward. “I’ll show you about myself. And I dare say I know some better sights than Vladya, anyway!” She gave them a wink, but her attempts at cheering them up fell flat, and it was a grim group that set off from the kremlin shortly afterwards.

  Chapter Ten

  Despite all of Aunty Olga’s attempts to be jolly, and to jolly the rest of them along too, they remained grim as they strode down the streets to the market, which Aunty Olga told them would be full of interesting and exotic goods that they wouldn’t be able to find in the South. That did sound like fun, they all agreed, but Dasha couldn’t stop thinking about Vladya and the Westerners, Susanna kept muttering about Northern barbarians and their barbarically cold summers, and Svetochka seemed completely overwhelmed by the city sights and sounds, even if “city” was an overly generous term for the glorified village that was Lesnograd. Even the normally irrepressible Alik, who was their guard for the day (much to Aunty Olga’s indignation: she had protested that Dasha had no need of a guard, not in Lesnograd and especially not when she was in the company of her own aunt, but Oleg had said, with a twist of his mouth, “You don’t know what kind of trouble Dasha can get into. Besides, the Tsarinovna needs a guard wherever she goes,” and Aunty Olga had backed down and agreed), walked behind them in frowning silence, with little wrinkles around his eyes as if they pained him, or the light hitting them was too strong, even though it was a cloudy, chilly morning.

  “Are you ill, Alik?” Dasha finally asked, breaking the silence that had settled around them like a storm cloud.

  “Ill? Why’d you think that, Tsarinovna? I’m not ill,” he said, and attempted a smile, which came out more as a grimace.

  “You look unwell,” she told him. “Maybe you should go back and send someone else out.”

  Aunty Olga snorted. “Serves him right,” she said. “He’s not ill, my girl, he’s hungover.”

  “Really?” said Dasha, and stared at him in surprise. “How did that happen?”

  Now Alik snorted along with Aunty Olga, although he made a face and rubbed his forehead afterwards. “How do you think?” said Aunty Olga. “Too much vodka, or was it beer?”

  “Both,” said Alik shortly, still rubbing his head. He attempted another grin, and this one, buoyed by the memories of the previous night’s merriment, was slightly more successful. “You Northerners know how to brew, I’ll give you that,” he told Aunty Olga. “We should steal a few of your brewers and bring ‘em back to Krasnograd. Our own…‘course, the water there isn’t worth much either. If you start with p…” He stopped and coughed, which made him rub his head again.

  “I understand,” said Aunty Olga dryly. “Is the Tsarina still on about clean water?”

  “Much good that it does her,” said Alik, and then glanced guiltily over at Dasha. “No disrespect, Tsarinovna,” he said.

  “I am not offended,” Dasha told him. “I know my mother’s efforts to encourage the people to drink clean water have not met with a great deal of success. We boil our own water,” she told Aunty Olga, “but many people don’t. They say they don’t have the time or the fuel. And encouraging people to place their middens and privies so that they don’t run off into wells and streams has also not met with much success either. It’s too much work, they say.”

  “It is when you’re tired,” said Alik. “Ah, Tsarinovna. But brewing…if more people brewed beer, they’d have something clean to drink. Beer’s clean; it won’t make you ill like dirty water.”

  “You look ill to me,” said Dasha, and then flushed in embarrassment. She hadn’t meant to sound so pert! But she had anyway! “I didn’t mean it like that,” she said.

  “Ah well, that’s my own fault, Tsarinovna,” said Alik, more kindly than she deserved.

  “Does Oleg Svetoslavovich know about this debauchery?” asked Aunty Olga, eyeing him sternly.

  Alik gave her a brief grin. “Who do you think started it, Olga Vasilisovna?”

  Aunty Olga tsked. “I should have known. As long as it stays with drinking. No doubt your mother thinks we’re watching over you, keeping you out of trouble.”

  “A little late for that, Olga Vasilisovna,” said Alik with another brief grin, and then looked like he wished he hadn’t said it. Aunty Olga shook her head, but more as if she were amused, not angry. Dasha felt herself flushing again, and tried not to turn and stare at Alik. Did he mean..? Last night?! Surely not! He must have meant some other time, if he meant what her fevered imagination—she couldn’t dignify it with the name of “visions”—thought he meant. Which was terrible to think about! He was hardly any older than she was! Well, only two or three years, which…was a lot, actually. A woman of his summers would be of age, and able to marry, and buy and sell property, and do whatever she liked. Unlike Dasha, who still had to have her mother’s permission for all those things. But still..! Dasha glanced at him out of the corner of her eye, and felt herself flushing even more, this time with a most unaccustomed sensation, which must be…jealousy? Was this jealousy that was making her spine prickle and her arms sweat? It must be, but whether it was the jealousy of a little child, or a sister, or a lover, she couldn’t tell, and in any case it was entirely inappropriate. If he ever found out..! The very thought made her flush even more.

  “I will mention beer to my mother,” she said, looking down at her feet. “It is a good idea.”

  “And you can sample some while you’re here,” Aunty Olga told her.

  “I’m sure I will enjoy that,” said Dasha, although she was sure of no such thing. She tolerated watered wine reasonably well, but beer was bitter, and her memory of how ill everyone had felt after their evening of drinking at their farewell party was still green in her mind. She felt a pang of sympathy for Alik. He looked like he felt even worse than she had, and yet here he was, trailing after them on an errand that perhaps held no interest for him, walking down a dirty, uneven street, through air that was chilly and stifling at the same time, trying to be polite and alert, when no doubt he would rather be back in bed. Which thought made him even more attractive than before. Perhaps that was why prickles were running so insistently up and down Dasha’s spine now. She shook her head and shrugged her shoulders, but the prickles remained.

  I mustn’t have a fit in the middle of the market! Dasha told herself. I mustn’t, I mustn’t! And I mustn’t have a fit in front of Aunty Olga, either. What Aunty Olga would say if she found out about Dasha’s fits didn’t bear thinking of. Dasha doubted she would be sympathetic. Oh, she would act sympathetic, and say the right words, or as close as she could come—Aunty Olga was nearly as bad as Oleg when it came to saying the wrong thing—but Dasha couldn’t help but remember, as clearly as if she were having a vision, the last time Aunty Olga had come to Krasnograd, and how her mouth had twisted when she had seen an elderly princess, shaking with palsy, being helped down the kremlin corridors, and how she had said that she’d rather die than live like that, and that the only right thing for someone like that to do was slit her own throat, or take poison if she couldn’t hold her hand steady enough to wield the knife. “Anything else is selfish cowardice,” she had declared.

  Is that what Aunty Olga would think of me, if she saw me have a fit? Would she think I should kill myself, in order to spare others the burden of my pain? Dasha wondered, as the prickles grew and spread, till she wanted to reach back and claw open the back o
f her skull, she could see herself reaching back and scratching and tearing at her own skin till her fingers came away bloodied, and bone was showing through her hair…Tfoo! No, no, no! That would never happen to her! But telling herself that only made the prickling worse, till Dasha wanted to scream and bash her head against the fences and walls they were walking past.

  “Here we are,” declared Aunty Olga, distracting her from her misery. “The market. The Haymarket, but also the Beast Market, this time of year. Come on, let’s see what they’ve got.”

  “We saw camels in the Krasnograd Beast Market,” Svetochka said suddenly, breaking the silence she’d steadfastly maintained throughout their entire walk thus far. “They smelled bad.”

  “No camels here, I’m afraid, but—look! A bear! Shall we go look at him?”

  “I don’t want to see the bear,” Dasha said, but she said it in such a tiny voice that no one noticed, and Aunty Olga was already striding over in the direction of the iron cage that was just barely big enough for the bear to fit in, as long as he didn’t stand up or lie down, but sat back on his haunches without moving. Feeling even sicker and more fit-like than before, Dasha trailed reluctantly after her.

  “What a horrid creature,” said Svetochka, as they drew closer. The bear huffed at them. She wrinkled her nose. “What a brute! An’ he stinks, too.”

  “You’d stink too if someone stuck a brass ring through your nose and chained you up in a tiny cage,” said Dasha, but once again, no one seemed to hear her. For a moment the bear’s eyes caught her own, but Dasha, to her shame, found herself looking away, unable to face the tale of suffering she read there in his all-too-expressive eyes.

  That expression doesn’t mean what I think it does, she told herself. Just because it looks to me like he’s full of hopeless despair doesn’t mean that he really is. I’m just imagining things; it’s not really as bad as I think it is. Thinking anything else, thinking that his expression really meant exactly what it looked to her to mean, and that the life he was leading was just as miserable for him as it would be for her, was too awful. If Dasha allowed herself to admit to what she knew to be true, she would have to do something, but all she could think of doing at the moment was…what? She didn’t know, other than that it would be terrible. So she lied to herself instead, even as she knew that all her words were the worst kind of cowardly self-deception. She made herself look up from the ground and over to her companions, thinking that they must feel the same way, that they were thinking the same thing, and that, being braver and cleverer than her, would come up with the right words to protest what was happening, and have the courage to utter them out loud.

  “Is he dangerous?” asked Susanna, going up to the cage and looking him over with interest.

  “Not any more, he ain’t, noblewoman,” said the man standing by the cage. He was…actually, in another light, on another day, he would have been handsome. He was older than Dasha, maybe even twice her age, but he was still closer to her age than to that of her parents, and he had thick dark hair, darker than that of everyone else Dasha had seen so far in Lesnograd, and high sharp cheekbones that spoke of the steppe. “When he were young he were terrible mean, but he ain’t no more,” he said. “You want to see him dance? We trained him to dance.”

  “Oh, yes!” exclaimed Susanna, drowning out Dasha’s “No.”

  “Come on, then,” said the man, unlocking the cage and jerking on the chain attached to the bear’s nose ring. Slowly, clumsily, the bear crouched down and lumbered out of the cage.

  “Ah!” cried Susanna and Svetochka together, half in fear and half in delight. Alik took a step closer so that he was right by Dasha’s side.

  “He’s bigger’n a human!” said Svetochka, her eyes huge. “I didn’t know they was so big!”

  “He’s a big one,” agreed the man, sounding pleased, his voice covering up Dasha’s murmur of “No, he’s not very big at all, he’s starving, look at him!”

  “Come on, then, dance!” shouted the man, jerking again on the chain. It must have hurt, but the bear made no sound of protest, no attempt to fight back, but merely pulled himself reluctantly up to a standing position, and—encouraged by a few whacks with a stick from the man—began shuffling back and forth in a clumsy dance. Susanna and Svetochka squealed in delight, and Aunty Olga and Alik were smiling, too. Dasha crossed her arms across her chest and clutched at herself to stop herself from trembling.

  “Faster!” cried the man, giving the bear another whack with his stick. The bear attempted to increase the speed of his shuffling, but his right paw appeared to be hurting him, and when Dasha looked down at it, she saw a large festering sore.

  “Stop, he’s hurt, he’s in pain,” she said, but no one seemed to hear her. The prickling was covering her entire body now, making her shiver, making her want to scream and scream and scream. She shook her head, and when that did nothing, she attempted to back away, to flee from this awful scene, but Alik grabbed her arm before she had even taken a step.

  “Ts…” He stopped himself, with a glance at the man, who was hitting the bear again. “Are you all right?”

  “No.” She shook her head. “No, no, no, I can’t stand it, I can’t stand it!”

  “Can’t stand what?”

  “How can you…” She choked and couldn’t get the rest of the words out. “How can you stand it?!” she demanded on her second try, pointing her chin at the painfully shuffling bear. “It’s so horrible!”

  “He’s just a bear,” Alik told her, with a gentle smile.

  And you’re just a man, but if we chained you up and beat you, you would still suffer! she wanted to scream at him, but she couldn’t get the words out, they were locked behind her teeth by an entire life of politeness, and by the knowledge her visions were giving her that her words would only hurt Alik without doing any good—she could see him now, in her mind’s eye, shaking his head and backing away, denying everything she was telling him, making excuses, making her hate him for his weakness—and the prickling shivers that were overcoming her entirely, so that she knew she was about to have a fit, she was about to have a fit, she was about to have a fit, oh gods, let it come now, let it come now and end her suffering, let it come now… “AKH!” she screamed, the blissful relief already spreading through her body as she jerked and twitched, her eyes rolling in her head and her teeth snapping as the tingling exploded and then dissipated.

  “Dasha!” cried everyone, hands reaching out and clutching at her, trying to lead her somewhere, to get her to sit down somewhere, drink some water which they didn’t have anyway…

  “I’m fine, I’m fine,” she assured them. “I’m fine!” She pushed their hands away. “It’s just something that happens sometimes.”

  “More than sometimes,” said Alik, his face drawn. “Begging your pardon, but”—he turned to Aunty Olga—“it happens every day, sometimes more.”

  “Is this true?” demanded Aunty Olga, looking down at Dasha as if she had done something very terrible.

  “Ye-es,” said Dasha, flinching away from Aunty Olga’s angry gaze, and then straightening back up and saying, “But it’s not my fault! You don’t need to be so angry with me! It’s not my fault, it just happens! Especially when I’m angry!”

  “Angry?” Aunty Olga’s forehead creased in the middle. “What have you got to be angry about?”

  “This!” All the rage that had been locked behind Dasha’s teeth burst out in that one word and the pointing finger she flung at the man with the bear, but, to her horror, she could tell by the sound of her voice and the look on Aunty Olga’s face that to the others, she sounded as if she were about to burst into hysterical tears—and she was! Of rage! As any decent person would! But the others didn’t see it that way at all, she could tell, and they were already dismissing her words as the ravings of an overwrought little girl—as if that were a reason to disregard them! Of course she was overwrought! Outrage, burning outrage, was the only sensible response to the cruelty that was playing ou
t in front of her, that everyone else seemed to think was no more than such good fun—just as those boys had, no doubt, the ones who had raped Fenya and not known what they were doing, and had been sent off to hard labor in punishment for their crimes, but everyone around her, her companions, her kin, were just as horrible, even though they were walking around free! And they thought she was the one who was crazy and hysterical! Dasha tried to say some of these things, but her teeth locked down on her words again, and her throat filled with tears, and all she could manage was another “This!” and a trembling wave of her hand.

  “It’s been a long journey,” said Aunty Olga, with a meaningful glance at Alik that made Dasha’s cheeks burn so hotly with rage she half-expected to see steam rising up around her. “No doubt you’re still tired. We should go back and let you get some rest.”

  “I’m not tired!” protested Dasha. Aunty Olga’s lips twitched, and Dasha could see her trying not to laugh at her, she could see, so clearly it felt even more real than what was really happening, that to Aunty Olga she sounded just like a child of three who didn’t want to go to bed, and that Aunty Olga was seeing her as she had been when she really had been a child of three, just as clearly as Dasha was seeing her seeing her, and… “I’m not tired!” she repeated, making things even worse than before, because now everyone was gathered around her, whispering to each other that she’d just had a long hard journey, that she was a delicate girl of noble birth and she hadn’t been allowed to rest properly, that she suffered from some mysterious ailment, these fits, you know, these fits…Dasha could see herself standing up, pushing them all away, screaming “I’M NOT TIRED!” at them, hitting them with her flame-filled hands, grabbing the bear and running off with him, and then…what? What then? Where would they go? How would they live? Neither of them could live in the wild. She had never learned how, and he had been so broken and twisted that he had long since forgotten.