The Breathing Sea II - Drowning

by E. P. Clark

  “The Westerner,” Aunty Olga whispered back. She gave Dasha a little push. “Go. Go join Vladya.”

  Dasha made her way over to the dais, and climbed—clumsily, she thought—onto it. There was nowhere for her to sit, so, after dithering for a moment, she went and stood beside Vasilisa Vasilisovna.

  “Ah, Tsarinovna,” said Vladya, once Dasha had taken up her position beside Vasilisa Vasilisovna’s chair. “Thank you for joining us. We require your knowledge and council. And I thought you might like to look upon the results of your handiwork this morning.”

  “My work this morning? I didn’t have anything to do with this…I’ve never seen this woman before in my life…she isn’t even Zemnian…”

  “No, she is from Rutsi. Bir-git, is it not?” Vladya stumbled over the unfamiliar name, and had to say it twice before the woman caught on, and nodded fearfully.

  “Birgit.” It really was a very difficult name to pronounce. Dasha gave her a warm smile. “What happened to her?” she asked. “How did she come here? And why is she in chains?”

  “How she came to Zem’ I don’t know,” said Vladya. “The same way as the rest of them, I suppose. But she is in chains because she was caught stealing food and clothing yesterday on the outskirts of Lesnograd.”

  “In her condition that’s hardly a crime,” objected Dasha. “Poor thing!”

  “When she was accosted, she pulled a knife on the owners of the food and the clothing, and tried to stab them. Cut one of them quite deeply on the arm, too.”

  “Even so! Anyone would do the same if they were starving!”

  “So you say. No one has ever tried to steal anything of yours. She was subdued eventually, and taken away. They should have turned her in to us, for questioning, but people’s blood is up now, hatred against these Westerners is high…”

  Dasha wanted to turn away, cover her ears, do something to prevent herself from hearing the rest of the story, but she couldn’t, and Vladya continued inexorably on.

  “So they took her away, to the men who run half the sport in Lesnograd. Your friends, Yaromir and Ratibor, whom you so embarrassingly turned into a bear last night. But only Ratibor, because he was the only one who was keeping watch over the chief source of their livelihood last night. Yaromir was off in a cellar somewhere, overseeing the sport provided by Birgit.”

  “Sport?” asked Dasha. “What kind of sport could she offer?”

  “Why, the same kind as new recruits do for their barracks, and new convicts do for the old hands. That kind of sport, Dasha.”

  The flush of rage that rose up Dasha’s neck was so strong that for a moment her head spun, and she thought she might pass out.

  “Who knows how many raped her,” Vladya continued, with malicious pleasure. “Half a dozen, no doubt, and maybe more. She doesn’t remember, you know: people in her position rarely do. You think you would remember every detail, but it’s all just confusion and horror, and all you know is that something terrible has happened to you. Which is all Birgit knows, isn’t it, Birgit?”

  Birgit nodded hesitantly, obviously not understanding anything other than her name.

  “How do you know this?” Dasha asked. “She doesn’t speak a word of Zemnian.”

  “Why, as it happens, I have an interpreter. Our Yulya here lived amongst the Rutsi, and even took one into her bed. The best way to learn the language, so they say. And so now she speaks it fluently. Isn’t that so, Yulya?”

  A short, faded-looking woman stepped forward from the shadows in the corner where she had been keeping herself concealed. “That is so, Vladislava Vasilisovna,” she said. “Every word she says is true, Tsarinovna.”

  “Oh.” Dasha swallowed back the rage and revulsion that was threatening to choke her. “So what are you going to do?”

  “About Birgit?”

  “No. About them. The men who did this. Our men. Zemnians, Vladya, Zemnians did this! We did this!”

  “It’s no worse than what happens in every barracks and prison, every night,” Vladya told her, with stubborn composure.

  “I don’t…I don’t care! That doesn’t make it right! And she’s a foreigner, fleeing war, starving! That makes it worse! What kind of monsters are we?!”

  “I am glad you are taking responsibility, Dasha,” said Vladya, still with that same enraging composure. “Seeing as how you are in part responsible.”

  “What? How?!”

  “Why, because you got mixed up with those characters, threatened their livelihood, forced them to turn to other avenues of income.”

  “NO! That was not me! They had already started this before I went to the barn and rescued the bear! This was all them!”

  “But you threatened them, yesterday morning in the market, threatened their livelihood, made them desperate.”

  Dasha found she had gone around the chair in which Vasilisa Vasilisovna was wringing her hands and murmuring “Now, girls, now, girls,” to herself, and was now standing almost nose-to-nose with Vladya. Except that Vladya was sitting, so Dasha was really leaning over her, looming over her, shaking her finger in her face and shouting so that Vladya was squirming back in her chair, trying to get away from Dasha’s vehement words.

  “It was not me! They would have done it regardless, because this is the kind of thing that they do, Vladya! This is who they are! They steal, they rape, they kill—and all for sport! Mixing with them leads to evil because they are evil! They would have done it regardless. And you…you knew who they were! You let them practice their trade here, out in the open, in the middle of Lesnograd, for all to see and see your approval! This is on your head, Vladya, if it is on anybody’s, yours!”

  “Girls,” Vasilisa Vasilisovna was saying, “not here, girls, not here, not in the Great Hall, not here, girls, not here.” She reached out and took a feeble hold of Dasha’s arm, but Dasha brushed her aside as if she were no more than a fly.

  “If you hadn’t provoked them…” Vladya began.

  “Enough.” Dasha stepped back. “It doesn’t matter anyway. What are we going to do about it?”

  “She should be questioned.” Vladya was breathing heavily, and her smooth oval face was pink. “That is why I brought her here now. So that she could be questioned.”

  “Has a healer seen her?”

  “She’ll get a healer if she answers my questions.”

  “She should be taken somewhere private,” said Dasha. “Somewhere where she’s not chained up and on display like this. And she should be seen by a healer, and then we should ask her questions.”

  “Why should she answer our questions if we’ve already given her everything she wants?”

  “Consider it a sign of good faith on our part,” said Dasha. “Consider it a sign of good faith on your part, so that I will put in a good word with my mother for you when she finds out about all this.”

  That took Vladya aback, although Dasha could tell that she didn’t want anyone else to know that. It seemed that Vladya still respected her mother; perhaps she was the only person in all of Zem’ whose good opinion Vladya was eager to keep, and afraid to lose. And what her mother would say to a lone woman, seeking refuge, being raped by Zemnians for sport, even if she was a Westerner, made Dasha quail a little on the inside too, even though she had had absolutely nothing to do with it, and would have stopped it if she could have.

  “We should treat her injuries and take her story,” Dasha continued, “and then take her to my mother, when we meet her in Pristanograd. So that my mother may question her.”

  “You assume that we will all be going to Pristanograd!” snapped Vladya, recovering some of her old temper.

  “Won’t we?” asked Dasha.

  There was a long pause.

  “Very well,” said Vladya grudgingly. “Someone summon Apraksiya Bozhenovna to the small chamber, and I will meet her there, along with the Tsarinovna, Yulya, and the prisoner. And my mother and Olga Vasilisovna, if they care to join us,” she added as an afterthought. She stood. “Come,” she
said. “Don’t just stand there! Come!” She swept off the dais and in the direction of the small chamber, which seemed to be the chamber by the kitchen where they took their meals, without waiting for anyone else.

  Dasha followed more slowly, shadowing Birgit, who was looking around in confusion and terror. Aunty Olga dismissed her guards and said she would escort her herself, since, as she put it, “Best if there’s only women around her for the moment, poor thing, even if she is a foreigner.”

  “Did you know?” Dasha asked, as they made their slow way, hampered by Birgit’s injuries and her fetters, across the Great Hall.

  “About what happened to her? Oh, I knew. I heard the story when she first told it to us.”

  “No, I mean…about Ratibor and Yaromir. About what they did.”

  “About this…no, not till I heard the story. And maybe it’s the first time for them.”

  “But about their other activities. You knew about that.”

  Aunty Olga took a long time answering. “I knew,” she said finally. “We all knew.”

  “And you’re surprised at what they did to Birgit!”

  “That’s different,” said Aunty Olga. Dasha wanted to shout at her that no, it wasn’t, not at all, but that would win her little, she could tell, so instead she said (which was hardly any more helpful), “Why is rape such a problem here in Lesnograd? I’ve only been here a few days and already you’ve had two incidents!”

  “It’s the same in Krasnograd,” Aunty Olga told her. “Your mother just protected you from seeing it, is all.”

  “Well, we should put a stop to it!”

  “So we should,” said Aunty Olga, with a sad little smile. “Along with lots of other things. But we haven’t managed to yet.”

  Dasha was still mulling this over when they arrived at the small chamber, only to be told by Apraksiya Bozhenovna that they should wait outside along with everyone else except Yuliya until she had finished examining and treating Birgit. Vladya was not pleased about that, but Apraksiya Bozhenovna insisted, gently but with a firmness that even Vladya could not overcome, until she agreed.

  When they were finally admitted into the chamber, Birgit was seated and unshackled. She was still wearing the same rags, but she was cleaner than before, and was nervously sipping at a bowl of steaming broth, which Apraksiya Bozhenovna said she should drink until her stomach was settled enough for real food.

  “Birgit has given me her story, through Yuliya,” Apraksiya Bozhenovna told them, her calm face grimmer and angrier than Dasha would have imagined possible. “And my examination of her injuries bears it out. It is as she has already said, and it will do no good for her to repeat it again. She was abused most vilely for sport, as convicts and prisoners enjoy abusing each other, managed to escape when she was discarded after they were finished, and picked up by our patrols, who recognized her as a foreigner and arrested her. The other details matter little now. The main culprit has already been identified, due to the lucky chance that Birgit saw him when he was also arrested this morning, and brought in to the cell neighboring hers.”

  So it wasn’t my fault that this happened to her! Dasha thought triumphantly. But it’s because of what I did that the culprits were identified. She was tempted to turn to Vladya and point all this out to her, but when she thought of how that would sound, and how Vladya would react, she stopped herself.

  “What about the others?” Dasha asked. “Has she identified them?”

  Apraksiya Bozhenovna shook her head. “She has given descriptions,” she said. “But her memory of the event is faulty, as tends to be the case, and she has no idea who they are. If you wish to find out their names, you would be better served by questioning those responsible.”

  “It is already being done,” said Vladya. Something about her tone made Dasha want to protest against it. Yes, of course, she wanted the other culprits to be found and punished, but…torture had been outlawed in Zem’, her mother had outlawed all forms of torture before Dasha had even been born, but they were a long way from Krasnograd, and there were many things, Dasha sensed, that would not count under the law as torture, but were anyway. And if using them elicited the names of those who had done this to Birgit, and allowed them to stop those men from wandering the streets freely, perhaps doing the same to others, was it really so wrong? Dasha tried to tell herself that it wasn’t, but she was aware that she was lying. How to stop it, though, was beyond her, and so, hating herself a little for her helplessness and her cowardice, she said nothing.

  “Her story,” said Aunty Olga. “Her story before she got here. We already know what happened to her here, the Black God take them that did it, but what we want to know is what’s happening in Rutsi, why their people are flooding our lands, attacking our people. And what we can do to stop it, though that might be a bit beyond her.”

  Yuliya turned to Birgit and began speaking to her in a tongue Dasha had never heard before. It was both alien and melodic, and Dasha wished that she had learned it, and became so engrossed in trying to catch familiar words—which only made her more confused, as her ears kept trying to turn meaningless sounds into meaning, creating nonsense words and sentences—and repetitions whose meaning she could puzzle out from context, that she was startled and confused when Yuliya stopped talking to Birgit, and began speaking to the rest of them in Zemnian.

  “She says she is from a border village,” Yuliya told them. “Near the border with both Zem’ and Seumi. The tribe who holds the village is in service to another, stronger tribe farther from the border, one that has been resisting the efforts of the Southerners—not those from Avkhazovskoye, those from the Middle Sea,” she clarified, with a glance at Susanna, “to conquer their lands. But the Southerners made an alliance with yet another, even stronger tribe, who conquered the tribe to whom Birgit’s village owes fealty, and as part of the surrender agreement between them—”

  “These barbarians make treaties of surrender?” Vladya interrupted.

  “They do when there are Southerners involved, it seems,” said Yuliya. “As part of the treaty of surrender, Birgit’s entire village was to be given over to the Southerners as slaves. Birgit’s family attempted to flee to Zem’ instead. Birgit was the only one who made it.”

  “And what were they planning to do once they made it to Zem’?” Vladya asked.

  Yuliya shrugged. “Not be enslaved by Southerners,” she told them. “I think that was the extent of their plans.” She turned back to Birgit and asked her more questions, to which Birgit replied with shrugs and a few hesitant words.

  “Birgit’s husband was a warrior,” Yuliya told them. “They hoped that he could be hired on as a guard or something similar here. But he was killed as they were escaping the village. Both their children died of hunger and sickness as Birgit fled East, towards us. She had thoughts of finding work as a laundress, it seems, or working the fields, but we have been less welcoming to her than she hopes.”

  “If she’d seen what her people had done to ours, she’d understand why,” said Vladya.

  Yuliya shrugged. “I think she’s already seen what her people are capable of—and ours as well. I think she expects us to keep her as a slave now.”

  “We do not keep slaves in Zem’,” said Vladya.

  Yuliya relayed this to Birgit, who, instead of cheering up at this information, became even more agitated.

  “She is afraid that since you do not intend to keep her as a slave, you will turn her out to starve,” Yuliya explained.

  “My mother will find a place for her, once she hears her story,” said Dasha quickly. “Ask her to write everything down, everything she knows about the Southerners and what happened to her village, so that we can present it to my mother when we meet her in Pristanograd.”

  “Like as not she doesn’t know how to write, Tsarinovna,” Yuliya told her.

  “Oh. Well…have her tell it to you, and you write it down. With as much detail as possible. Tell her she is valuable to us now, because of what she knows, a
nd we will take care of her. My mother will find a place for her, either in Pristanograd or in Krasnograd, and in the meantime—”

  “Don’t even think of saying she can stay with you,” Aunty Olga and Vladya both interjected quickly.

  “Where else are we going to put her? Where else would she be safe?”

  Vladya wanted to keep her in the cells where she had been held before, but Dasha, surprised at her own determination, objected so strenuously that Vladya eventually gave way, and agreed that she could be kept in a guest chamber, if under guard. Satisfied as best she could be that Birgit would not be actively molested, Dasha agreed to leave her to Apraksiya Bozhenovna’s care, while they went to question Yaromir and Ratibor about their involvement in the sorry affair.

  Chapter Fifteen

  Aunty Olga had very much wanted Dasha to stay behind for this part of the affair, saying that it would do no one, Dasha least of all, any good for her to see or hear anything of the business, and that she could be endangering her health by going down into the bad air of the cells beneath the kremlin and seeing the vile sights hidden away there.

  “I’m supposed to be the Tsarina someday,” Dasha had argued. “How can I rule when I don’t know what’s happening to the worst of my people?”

  “It’s one thing for a grown woman to see this sort of thing,” Aunty Olga had said. “And quite another for a little girl, especially a little girl in poor health.”

  “I am NOT a little girl! And I’m not ill, either.”

  This had held little sway with Aunty Olga, but the argument that Dasha was already involved, and would only become more so, and that she, as Tsarinovna, needed to know everything about the business in order to report on it to her mother, had finally won Aunty Olga over, and so Dasha had been one of the party that descended down the steep, slippery steps into the kremlin dungeon.

  It was not as dark as Dasha had feared it would be, lit as it was by torches, but she had never thought about how awful a place like that would smell, and almost retched when the unexpected reek of urine and feces and dirty bodies and stale air hit her.