The Breathing Sea II - Drowning

by E. P. Clark

  “I wouldn’t miss this for all the vodka in Lesnograd,” he said. “I can sleep later.”

  “Young men,” Aunty Olga muttered, which made all three of the young men laugh, and Oleg and Dmitry Marusyevich smiled, as if at fond memories. Which did nothing to sweeten Aunty Olga’s mood, and they made the rest of the journey in silence.

  When they arrived at the barn, after traversing most of Lesnograd, the doors were flung open and they could hear whoops and shouts of excitement coming from inside, along with what sounded like yipping and growling.

  “That doesn’t sound so bad,” said Aunty Olga, at the same moment as Oleg said, “That sounds bad.” He shared a look with Mitya and Dmitry Marusyevich. “I’ll go in first,” he said. “The rest of you wait out here.”

  “You can’t go in by yourself!” protested Aunty Olga. “I’m coming with you.”

  Oleg looked as if he wanted to argue against it, but after a moment he nodded curtly, his jaw muscles jumping, and stepped inside the barn, Aunty Olga right behind him.

  The shouts and cheers grew in pitch, and then fell silent. Dasha could distinctly hear Aunty Olga shouting, “What in the name of all the gods are you doing?!”

  “We should go in after them,” Dasha said.

  “Definitely not,” said Mitya, his face tight. “The gods alone know what’s going on in there. You girls should stay right here till we get called in.”

  There was some more shouting, this time laced with a distinct note of grumbling, from the barn, and then a couple of men stepped out of the door, their faces sour with disappointment. They were followed by a couple more, and then a couple more, until about a dozen or so men had come out of the barn, and Oleg stuck his head out after them and called for Dasha and the others to come join them.

  Inside Dasha saw Oleg and Aunty Olga standing next to a shabbily dressed man, who was stabbing his finger angrily at the bear. Well, the bear who had once been a man. He looked exactly like the bear he had kept chained up himself, down to the rusty chain in his nose. His eyes were different, though: those of the real bear had long become dulled with resignation and despair, while this bear’s eyes were full of fresh pain and terror. He had been brought out of his stall and chained up to a ring set in the floor. Blood was coming from his muzzle, and he was breathing heavily, as if he had been running. Lying nearby was…no, no, no, it couldn’t be, it couldn’t be…

  “Is that a dog?” whispered Susanna. The body was so mangled that it was difficult to tell.

  “Bear-baiting,” said Mitya in a low voice. “Don’t you have it in the South?”

  “Yes, but my mother does not allow it at our kremlin. I have never seen it. I asked many times, but she would never allow me to watch.”

  “It’s good fun,” said Mitya, and then, catching sight of Dasha’s face, shut his mouth and looked away.

  There’s nothing I can do, Dasha told herself. There’s nothing I can do for the dog. Nothing I can do. But she found herself walking on unbending limbs over towards its mangled body anyway.

  “Dasha!” cried Aunty Olga. “What are you doing?! Stay away from that beast! The gods alone know what it’ll do to you if you get too close!”

  “If you hurt me,” Dasha told the bear, looking him directly in the eyes, “I promise you, I swear by all the gods, the domoviye will keep you like this forever.”

  The bear dropped his gaze and shuffled as far away from her as his chain would allow. Dasha inched over to the dog. It was a big male, blocky and muscular, and had probably stood nearly as high as Dasha’s waist when he had been alive. But his throat and belly had been ripped open, spewing blood all over the floor and spilling his entrails out of his body. For a horrid instant Dasha thought she saw him breathing, and was afraid that he was still alive, but when she sidled up to him, holding her breath so as not to breathe in the nauseating scent of blood and bowels, and placed one squeamish hand on his body, she was relieved to feel no sign of breath or heartbeat.

  “He’s dead,” she announced, edging carefully away to where she could take a shallow breath again.

  “‘Course he’s dead!” cried the shabbily dressed man. “What else’s he gonna be, ripped open like that?! Now get out of here and leave me afore you ruin the rest of my day, drive off the rest of my viewers! Half of ‘em didn’t even pay up afore they left! A full ten chervontsev you cost me…”

  “That’s not enough.”

  “What?” The man’s head whipped around to stare at Dasha. “What d’you mean, not enough?”

  She had to swallow and make two tries to speak, her throat was so tight with rage and unshed tears. “It’s not enough,” she repeated. “How much was his life worth?” She pointed at the mangled body of the dog.

  The man shrugged. “He were just a mutt we found on the streets,” he said. “Good fighter, though. I didn’t think we’d lose him, but there you go. It were a good fight, one of the best we’ve put on, even without Ratya to egg him on. He were Ratya’s dog, not mine, an’ always fought best for Ratya. Where he’s got to, I don’t know…”

  “That’s what we’ve been trying to tell you,” Oleg interrupted. Dasha thought he was struggling not to smile. “He’s standing right in front of you.”

  “I’m not falling for your tricks.” The man shook his head. “I’m not listening to your nonsense. Ratya’s off drinking, ‘cause that’s what he does. This ain’t the first time he’s left me to take care of things for him.”

  “Where were you last night?” Dasha asked.

  “That ain’t none of your business! I were right here!”

  “Why didn’t you come down, then?” Dasha asked. “When we took the bear, and transformed Ratya? Where were you? Did you sleep through it? We woke Ratya up, but we saw no sign of you.”

  “You’re lying,” said the man. “I were right here all night.” He took a step closer to her. “I were right here all night! You’re trying to trick me, you’re making fun of me, you’re trying to trick me! I were right here all night!”

  “Or maybe you were with a woman,” suggested Oleg.

  The man’s face twisted in a way that said Oleg was right, only…there was something very wrong about it, too. Dasha could feel it, even though she wasn’t sure why, or what it was. Was it just his guilt at the exposure of his lack of virtue? Surely someone like him wouldn’t care about such a thing, would he? It wasn’t as if he were a man of noble birth, being kept virtuous and innocent for a marriage of alliance. No, this was something darker and more horrible. Dasha tried to see it with her visions, but they were resolutely blank and silent, as if whatever it was were so horrid that not even her visions could bear to look at it.

  “That’s neither here nor there,” cut in Aunty Olga, stopping Dasha’s fruitless attempts at seeing and stopping the two men from starting a fight over the man’s non-existent virtue. “None of us—well, some of us”—she glanced over at the girls, who were all shuffling and squirming with embarrassment at the turn the conversation had taken—“have much room to talk there. You weren’t here, were you?”

  The man spluttered a bit more, but eventually admitted that no, he hadn’t been there last night. He had gone off early in the evening, leaving Ratya alone to watch over the animals.

  “But he musta gone off,” the man protested. “He’d leave ‘em sometimes, no matter how much I’d give it to him when I found out. He’ll come staggering back in, just you see!”

  The bear made a growling noise that turned into a long, drawn-out moan. Everyone turned to look at him.

  “Why’s he shaking like that?” demanded the man. “What’s he doing? What’ve you done to him!”

  “I told you,” said Dasha. “That’s not the bear. That’s Ratya. Maybe he’s turning back already. The domovaya said one day. It’s only been half a day, but maybe it’s been enough already.”

  The bear shook himself all over, as if shaking off water, and then kept shaking, shaking and shaking, till the fur came off of him in clumps and clouds, and
he was getting smaller and smaller, even as his moans were getting louder and louder, till Dasha wanted to hide her eyes and cover her ears. This was her doing, his suffering was her doing, and even though she knew it was justice, or not even justice, much less justice than he actually deserved, right now it didn’t seem very just. And then he fell to the floor, writhing and screaming, screaming like a man, and then what sat up, trembling all over, was a naked man, covered in scratches and bruises, still chained to the floor by the nose, with blood running down his face.

  I wonder where his clothes went, Dasha thought, as the other man started to shriek, “Ratya! Ratya! Ratya, what’d they do to you!” He took a step towards Ratya, and then whirled around and pointed a finger at Dasha.

  “You! You did this!”

  “Yes,” said Dasha. “Well, it was the domovaya. But at my behest.”

  The man launched himself at her, only to run into Mitya and Seva, who stepped up and knocked him to the floor, as Alik jerked Dasha back, out of his reach.

  “Don’t hurt him!” Dasha cried, as Mitya and Seva both kicked the man in the ribs, making him cry out and writhe on the floor.

  “He attacked you,” Mitya told her grimly, hauling the man to his feet by his shirt collar. “He’s lucky we don’t…”

  “I know, I know, but he didn’t know what he was doing! Just, just, take him away somewhere, or something…”

  “And what shall we do with them?” Oleg asked, going over to Ratya and jerking him to his feet by his hair. “They’re here because of you; what do you want us to do with them now?”

  “Maybe they’ve learned their lesson,” said Dasha hopefully. “I just wanted them to learn their lesson, to stop hurting innocent creatures. Maybe they’ve learned their lesson now, and we can let them go.”

  “I shoulda taught you a lesson when I had the chance!” Ratya screamed at her. “I shoulda bashed your head in an’ raped your body, you an’ that child-freak you had with you!”

  “Apparently not,” said Oleg, throwing Ratya to the ground with enough force that all the breath came whuffing out of his lungs in a decidedly bear-like sound. “They were harmless enough before, but if we let them go now, they’ll go on to cause all kinds of trouble.”

  “They weren’t harmless before! They just weren’t harming you!”

  “Fair enough,” said Oleg after a moment, hauling Ratya back to his feet. Dasha wished she could stop herself from staring with sick fascination at his groin, but she couldn’t, and had to turn away in order to tear away her eyes. “But now they’re even worse than they were before. So what should we do with them?”

  “For a start, put some clothes on that one,” muttered Mitya. “And I’m sure there’re plenty of cells in the bottom of the kremlin for men like him,” he said more loudly.

  “He hasn’t broken any laws,” pointed out Oleg.

  “What he did should be against the law!” cried Dasha, at the same time as Mitya said, “Sure he has. Those like him always have. We just haven’t found out what they are yet.”

  There was some debate over this, with Oleg saying they couldn’t just go arresting people simply because they disliked them, and Mitya and Aunty Olga arguing that threatening the Tsarinovna was grounds for arrest in and of itself, and someone who would do something like that was surely guilty of other crimes as well, until in the end it was decided that Alik and Aunty Olga would escort the girls back to the kremlin, and Mitya, Seva, Dmitry Marusyevich, and Oleg would walk the two men back, where they would, indeed, be put into the dungeons until it could be decided what to do with them.

  “That wasn’t what I meant to happen!” Dasha said, once they were out of the barn.

  Aunty Olga gave her a look. “Well, what did you mean to happen?” she asked.

  “I meant for him to be sorry for what he’d done, and stop doing it! But now he went and killed that dog, who was probably his friend, because his other friend forced him into it, and they’re both being arrested, and they’re probably even meaner and more dangerous than before!”

  “Yes,” said Aunty Olga flatly. “That’s what happens when you go messing with bad people.”

  “But I couldn’t have just left them! I couldn’t have left things as they were! That wouldn’t have been right thing either! Only…”

  “Only you shouldn’t have gone running off in the middle of the night like that,” Aunty Olga told her sharply.

  Dasha was about to agree with her, in her mind if not with her words, but when she thought of how Aunty Olga was right, she realized that she was wrong. Perhaps things had not worked out so well as Dasha would have liked. But sitting in her chamber doing nothing would not have made things any better either. At least the bear was safe and free, more or less. She had done something good, made something right, even if she had made a mess as well. And she was determined to speak to Vladya about bear-baiting. It should be outlawed immediately. How Vladya had allowed something that horrid to carry on in her city was beyond Dasha’s comprehension, but like as not she hadn’t known about it. Surely as soon as Dasha told her about it, she would put a stop to it.

  ***

  “I don’t see why you’re bothering me with this,” Vladya was saying, looking down at Dasha from her position on the dais. Dasha had gone straight to the Great Hall, where she had found Vladya already sitting in judgment. Dasha had waited impatiently for the previous petitioners to finish—some silly disagreement over chickens—before bursting forward and demanding that Vladya listen to her, and then laying out the whole story before her.

  “Didn’t you hear me?!” demanded Dasha. “They’re…what they’re doing…it’s horrid! Barbaric! Cruel! I’d believe it of Westerners, but not of us!”

  “There are no laws against it,” said Vladya, looking pleased at being able to remind Dasha of that fact.

  “But there should be! And you could make them!”

  “I’d have to get my mother to agree to it,” said Vladya.

  “As if that would give you any trouble!”

  “Surely we have more important things with which to concern ourselves,” said Vladya. “Actual Western barbarians, for a start.”

  “Yes, but…it would be so easy for you! Just say that you’re outlawing it!”

  “And then what?” asked Vladya. “What then? Half the people in Lesnograd would turn against me for it. They like me well enough, I know that, but I also know that they don’t love me. And I don’t think there’s a princess in all of Zem’ who is well-loved enough to be able to pass a law like that. Tell people they have to fight and die for you, and they’ll kiss your boots and thank you for the opportunity. Tell people they have to starve because of what you’ve done, and they’ll grumble behind your back, but do nothing about it to your face. Tell them they can’t have their sport, they can’t have their entertainment, and they’ll scream and fight like you’re murdering their first-born daughter.”

  “But it’s just…it’s just sport,” said Dasha. “It doesn’t mean anything to them. They can live without it, and never know the difference. But those they hurt in their sport—it would mean their whole lives.”

  “I know. But that’s how people are.” Vladya gave a shrug. “Nothing any of us can do about it. But,” she held up a finger, “you said these men threatened you?”

  “Yes, but that’s…”

  “Death,” said Vladya with satisfaction. “Raising a hand against a member of the Imperial family means death.”

  “They didn’t hurt me! They didn’t even actually raise their hands against me. They just said some foolish words. And we don’t kill people in Zem’ any more.”

  “No?” Vladya raised a brow at that, as if Dasha had said something so childish and foolish, it was not even worth refuting. “Well, as you will. But flogging, surely. A hundred lashes, I’d say, maybe two hundred. It’s up to you.”

  “I don’t want them to get any lashes at all! I want them to stop hurting people!”

  “They weren’t hurting people,” Vla
dya told her, with infuriating patience. “They were entertaining people.”

  “You know what I mean!”

  “Do I? Do you? I don’t think anyone knows what you mean or want, Dasha, you least of all. Perhaps it’s the effect of your illness.”

  “I am not ill!”

  “No? Then why do healers keep being sent to your chamber?”

  “I…it…it doesn’t matter! That’s not what matters here! We’re…we’re…” To her horror, Dasha felt her throat closing, as warning tingles spread across her scalp, and she had to stop and bite her lip, hoping that the pain would stop the fit before it started, but as soon as she released the bite, a shudder went through her whole body, making her twitch and dance. It was only a small fit, but it was enough to make Vladya order that she be brought to her chamber and made to rest, before sitting back with a satisfied expression on her face.

  “Come,” Aunty Olga said, touching her shoulder with surprising gentleness. “Come, Dasha, my heart. You can’t do any more here. Let’s go get you some food. You must be hungry.” She took Dasha by the arm and led her out of the Great Hall.

  ***

  Dasha thought she was going to be marched straight back to her chamber and locked up again, but instead Aunty Olga, after dismissing Alik, Susanna, and Svetochka, telling them to go find their meal in their new chambers, so that she and her niece could talk heart-to-heart, took her to the small chamber by the kitchen where the servants took their meals. She sat Dasha down at the table, and then called into the kitchen for food. After a moment Sonya came out herself, bearing a tray laden with bread and fresh cucumbers in oil and vinegar and salted vegetable soup garnished with fresh dill. There were also mugs of what Dasha thought would be kvas, but when she sipped at it, it turned out to be beer instead. She set down her mug and looked up at Sonya and Aunty Olga.