The Breathing Sea II - Drowning

by E. P. Clark

  “We should go to Pristanograd,” repeated Vladya. “All of us. And bring Birgit and those men as well, so that your mother can hear their stories. And then, if she is pleased with them, she can send them to sanctuaries for safekeeping. All of them, even Birgit. There isn’t anything better for her. If she were to stay here, she’d always be a foreigner, one of those people who’ve been attacking our villages and molesting our people. No one here would ever let her forget it. But if she goes to a sanctuary, the sisters may accept her as one of their own. They are less likely to do real harm to her, at any rate. When will your mother be in Pristanograd?”

  “I don’t know,” said Dasha. “She was only just making plans when we left. I don’t think she knew herself yet.”

  “We should go soon,” Oleg put in. “Better to get there early and wait than to get there late and miss her.”

  “I don’t want to leave Lesnograd for too long,” said Vladya.

  “Leave Lesnograd? Why are you leaving Lesnograd?” Vasilisa Vasilisovna stepped into the chamber just in time to hear Vladya’s last words. Her face was already crumpling, before she had even heard the rest of the story. “You can’t leave Lesnograd, Vladenka! You can’t leave me!”

  Vladya’s resolve, which had been visibly wavering before, stiffened, along with her spine. “I have to,” she snapped out, more harshly than Dasha thought was warranted, making Vasilisa Vasilisovna crumple even more. “You can rule Lesnograd for a few months—”

  “A few months!”

  “Or however long it takes. You are Princess Severnolesnaya, after all. This is your city, your province. You can rule it in my absence.”

  “But Vladenka…”

  “Perhaps Aunty Olya can stay with you and help.”

  “I’d be wasted here,” Aunty Olga said quickly. “I’m much better on the road. Besides, I need to take Svetochka out on her first journey! I should come with you.”

  “Oh Olya! You wouldn’t leave me too!”

  “It’ll be good for you,” Aunty Olga said bracingly. “Like Vladya said, you are Princess Severnolesnaya. You should act like it.”

  Vasilisa Vasilisovna’s face crumpled up so much Dasha was afraid it would collapse in on itself entirely, or that at the very least she would burst out crying.

  “Is there no one who can give you council?” Dasha asked. When no one heard her the first time, she raised her voice and said, half-shouting, “Is there anyone whose council you trust, Vasilisa Vasilisovna? Someone who can aid you in this? My mother has the Princess Council; you should have something similar.”

  “A wise suggestion,” said Oleg, giving Dasha a warm smile. The effect was somewhat ruined by Vasilisa Vasilisovna saying, her voice trembling with reproach, “Since you sent Andrey away…”

  “Andrey was never a giver of wise council,” said Aunty Olga impatiently. “The opposite, in fact. Why you continued to listen to him…”

  “At least he was here, which is more than you can say!”

  Dasha and Vladya both tried to break up this sisterly squabble, but it ended only when Oleg shouted, “Girls! Enough!” thereby drawing the wrath of both Aunty Olga and Vasilisa Vasilisovna down on him. But once everyone’s hurt feelings were soothed, and peace (of a sort) restored, Vasilisa Vasilisovna agreed, resentfully and with many protests and qualifications, to draw up a list of people in Lesnograd and the immediate environs whose council she trusted, and who would be able to help and support her in her time of rule.

  “And don’t dally over it,” Vladya said, spoiling what had been an almost amicable moment between everyone. “We leave next week.”

  Dasha held her breath, afraid that this was going to start everything up all over again, but Vasilisa Vasilisovna seemed sufficiently broken, or resigned, to the tragedy that was about to befall her that she only nodded her acquiescence, and then Ratibor and Yaromir were brought into the chamber, looking slightly less bloody but, now that their injuries were no longer hidden by blood, even more battered. Mstislav Mayevich forcibly sat them down and chained them to their benches, which not even Dasha could bring herself to protest. Vladya, to Dasha’s surprise, called for them to be brought beer and vodka in order to dull their pain. Ratibor and Yaromir seemed just as surprised as Dasha at this, but they guzzled down everything that was brought to them, wincing as the alcohol washed over their wounded mouths but continuing to suck it down greedily nonetheless, until it was all gone. Yaromir promptly laid his head down on the table, even restrained as he was by his chains, and fell asleep.

  “You drugged us!” Ratibor cried, the accusation plain in his voice despite the slurring of his words.

  “Only with strong drink,” Vladya told him, a satisfied smile playing about the corners of her mouth. “You could have refused it, but you didn’t. Now are you ready to talk?”

  Ratibor looked over at the unconscious Yaromir, and then, reluctantly, nodded.

  “Excellent! So tell us about your scheme. Tell us about how you’ve been catching foreign women, and using them for your sport.”

  “It weren’t just women,” Ratibor said defensively. “It were anyone we could get. Boys was the most popular.”

  “Of course they were,” said Vladya. “Do tell us more.”

  Ratibor’s story came out with a great deal of drunken mumbling, angry cursing, obvious evasion, and most of the blame cast on Yaromir, who occasionally lifted his head off the table, looked about blearily, wriggled his shoulders, which must have been aching from the position in which his hands were chained to the bench, and then laid his head back down on the table without saying a word. After much tedious questioning and re-questioning, which Dasha found so annoying she was tempted to slap Ratibor, or at the very least give him a good pinch, herself, and could only admire Vladya’s (unexpected) patience with him, they pieced together the following story.

  Yaromir and Ratibor were third-brothers from a village outside of Lesnograd. They came from a family of hunters and trackers, but neither of them cared overmuch for spending their days, and especially their nights, out in the woods. When Ratibor’s dog killed two other dogs in a fight, they realized they held at the end of his chain another, easier source of income, and they took to arranging dog fights. That dog was eventually killed, but they had already captured the bear, as well as breeding up another litter of dogs, even more vicious than their father, and had become renowned in all the villages to the South of Lesnograd for the excellent sport that they provided.

  Once they had the bear sufficiently trained—“Trained!” Dasha exclaimed in outrage, but softly enough that no one else heard her—they started bringing him, along with their best dogs, to Lesnograd, where they would pick up coins at the market with the bear’s dancing during the day, and arrange dog fights and bear-baiting at night. They were now the richest people in their home village, despite having no wives and thus no land or property, nor any respectable trade (as their mothers were quick to remind them at every turn, Ratibor recounted with indignation).

  One day that winter, though, disaster struck, or so it seemed at the time. An unusually large and heavily armed party of foreigners came to their village, and attacked it, intent on stealing all the supplies they could. Ratibor and Yaromir, reluctant to engage the foreigners themselves, released their dogs on them. Most of the dogs were killed, but in the process they brought down several of the raiders as well. The warriors they attacked died shortly afterwards of their wounds, but a pregnant woman and a boy of about twelve summers fared slightly better.

  Once it became apparent that the woman and the boy were likely to survive, the villagers, and Ratibor and Yaromir in particular, had a problem: what to do with them. They were alive but still badly injured, and they spoke no Zemnian. Ratibor’s mother strongly urged them to bring the captured foreigners to Lesnograd and turn them over to the Severnolesniye, as proof of the raids, which were still being taken more as rumor than as fact in Lesnograd. Yaromir and Ratibor, however, were reluctant to bring the attention of the Severnol
esniye down on themselves, even as they also refused to turn their captives over to someone whose activities did not skirt quite so close to the law.

  Not that it mattered, Dasha thought. There was no law against what they were doing, and the Severnolesniye were turning a blind eye to it anyway. The worst thing that would have happened to them is that they would have been arrested and charged with not paying their fair share of taxes. This did not seem so very bad to Dasha, but after some hard pressing on Vladya’s part, it came out that Ratibor and Yaromir had an overwhelming horror both of paying their taxes to Lesnograd, and of being caught for not paying their taxes. This illogic irked Dasha almost more than anything else she had heard. Everything else they had done was so terrible that she had a hard time even crediting it, and could feel nothing other than a rage that was so great it seemed to exist separately from the rest of her. But their determination to avoid paying their taxes was petty enough that she could understand it, and it somehow brought home how much she despised them more clearly than anything else about them.

  While they were debating what to do, the idea came up of using the captives for sport. Only they didn’t call it that at first. It was justice. These people had attacked their village, stolen their winter provisions, burned down a house, injured people, killed Ratibor’s dogs—they should be punished. It was only right. And if Yaromir and Ratibor gained some recompense in the process, so much the better. Not even Ratibor’s mother, who seemed to be the voice of reason in this tale, protested overmuch.

  The first night of sport brought in money beyond even Ratibor’s wildest dreams. Unfortunately, the woman miscarried and died as a result of it, and the boy somehow managed to hang himself shortly afterwards, thus cutting off their source of income. But the idea had been planted, and when Ratibor and Yaromir heard of another raid on a neighboring village, they set off in search of any refugees who might be lurking nearby, alone, maybe injured or starving, easy to capture and exploit.

  They spent the rest of the winter and spring learning the most popular paths and secret hiding places of the Westerners, normally women and children traveling alone—it was common for the warriors to abandon the women, children, elderly, and infirm when the going got hard or supplies got low, Ratibor claimed, which aligned so perfectly with everything they had all heard of Westerners that everyone believed him—and occasionally, when they had great luck, an injured warrior, whom they took great pleasure in forcing to fight until he could no longer stand, and then, if he survived, raping him until he died from his injuries or killed himself. Killing oneself must be common amongst them, Ratibor said, since their captives had proven to be surprisingly adept at it, finding ways to do it that never would have crossed their captors’ minds, and so preventing them from it had been more difficult than they would have thought. Even so, Yaromir and Ratibor now had so much coin from these ventures that they no longer knew what to do with it, or even where to store it, and spent long hours quarreling over what to do with it, and agonizing over the possibility of it being stolen. Ratibor claimed that he had been arguing for them to quit while they could, but it was Yaromir, overcome with a lust for gold and vengeance, who had insisted that they continue, and who had been solely responsible for capturing Birgit, and arranging the night of sport with her.

  “I’m sure,” said Vladya, one corner of her mouth twisting upwards in a non-smile. “But that is neither here nor there. Of more interest to us are these paths and hiding places. You say they often use the same ones?”

  “Like animals, Princess, like animals,” said Ratibor, nodding eagerly. “They don’t even have the wit to take different paths through the woods; they just follow each other blindly.”

  “But apparently they do have the wit to share information about these paths amongst themselves,” said Vladya.

  Ratibor said nothing to that, but looked away instead, afraid to meet Vladya’s eyes. Not that Dasha could blame him.

  “Can you describe them?” Vladya asked. “These paths?”

  Ratibor could, but since none of the rest of them had any idea where “The old oak stump on the far side of the horse-pond” or “The stream that runs into the bog that stands half a verst beyond the Southern cow-pasture” were, his descriptions gave them little of use.

  “You’ll have to show them to us,” Vladya decided, cutting him off. “We’ll take you there and you can show them to us. Take them back to their cells,” she told Mstislav Mayevich. “Treat them gently, providing they do nothing to provoke you, and give them whatever they require, within reason, in the way of food and treatment, to speed their healing. We leave for Pristanograd in a week’s time, and they must be ready to accompany us.”

  “We can’t go to Pristanograd!” Ratibor protested, but then, catching Vladya’s eye, looked away and mumbled something that might have been “As you wish.”

  “A good day’s work,” declared Vladya, looking happier than Dasha had seen her since she’d arrived. “Come, mother: we have work to do. We must prepare for my absence.” She swept out of the chamber, drawing Vasilisa Vasilisovna after her, and leaving the rest of them to dispose of themselves as they wished.

  Chapter Sixteen

  The next morning at breakfast Vladya, still looking more cheerful than she had since Dasha had arrived, laid out her plans for their travel to Pristanograd.

  “We set off in a week,” she announced. “If our prisoners are still weak, they can ride in a cart. In fact, they can ride in a cart anyway, as they’ll need to be chained up.”

  “But not in the same cart,” Dasha said.

  “Why not?” asked Vladya.

  “You can’t possibly intend to put Birgit in the same cart with Ratibor and Yaromir!”

  “They’ll be chained up,” said Vladya, looking at Dasha as if she were the stupidest creature in the Known World. “They won’t be able to hurt her. And anyway, she’s one of them—a foreigner. We shouldn’t be bending over backwards to make things easier for them. In fact, it would be justice.”

  “Even so!” cried Dasha, irritated with Vladya for turning something that was very simple into something unnecessarily complicated through the application of logic. “Imagine if you were her!”

  Vladya gave Dasha another look, this one stating clearly that she would never be anything like Birgit, or suffer her fate. Out loud she said, “We don’t have the time to mollycoddle them. They’re captives.”

  “We’ll have to take two carts anyway,” Oleg put in at this point. “At least. We can put them in different carts easily enough.”

  Vladya’s lips thinned, as if she wanted to argue against that solution on principle, but after a moment she nodded in curt agreement, and said, “And we will be on the lookout for more foreigners as we travel.”

  “And then what?” asked Dasha.

  “What do you mean, ‘And then what’?”

  “What will we do if we find some?”

  “Capture them, of course.”

  “How?” asked Dasha.

  “If you would listen instead of constantly interrupting me, you would know that we’ll be bringing a full detail of guards with us,” Vladya told her. “I mean to show your mother an example of the army I’m raising.”

  “Oh. And, ah, once we catch these foreigners, what will we do with them?”

  “Question them, of course. Take them with us to Pristanograd.”

  That sounded like an unwieldy plan to Dasha, especially as Vladya had been the one to accuse her of wanting to bring half of Lesnograd with them, but she could see she had already tested Vladya’s patience far enough, and so she forced herself to remain quiet as Vladya explained that she had already sent a courier on ahead, to warn the castrates’ sanctuary in Pristanograd to expect a sudden large influx of new brothers.

  “What, you’re just going to make all the captives join the castrates, whether they will it or not?” Dasha burst out at this point.

  “They can always join the road crews instead,” Vladya told her.

 
Dasha couldn’t think of a good argument against that, even though she sorely wanted to, and so she simmered wordlessly as Vladya finished describing her plans, told everyone who brought up any objections that they were wrong, and then stood and told everyone she had a busy day ahead of her, and they should either go about their duties or, if they had no duties, at least stay out of her way until it was time to leave.

  “Is Apraksiya Bozhenovna free?” Oleg asked Aunty Olga, once Vladya had swept out of the chamber, intent on her heavy duties.

  Aunty Olga shrugged. “For you she will be,” she said. “Why?”

  “I want to take Dasha to the sanctuary. To where…to the sanctuary. But I want to consult with Apraksiya Bozhenovna first. To make sure that it wouldn’t endanger Dasha, or make her fits worse.”

  Aunty Olga got a stubborn look on her face. “She should stay here and rest,” she said. “Especially if we’re going to be dragging her off on another journey next week. I’d leave her here if I could, but…maybe it’s best for her to be brought back to her mother.”

  “I’m fine!” Dasha said loudly. “I made it all the way here, didn’t I? And there’s no need for me to rest: it’s not as if I have a chill or a wound. If I’m going to have fits, I don’t see that it matters where I am. I have just as many fits when I’m doing nothing as when I’m on the road. And who knows: perhaps they will be able to help me there at the sanctuary. I want to go, and when we leave for Pristanograd, I want to go there as well.”

  “She’s right,” said Oleg. “She’s not in any more danger on the road than anywhere else, and they might be able to help her there. And she should go.”

  “If they’ll let her stay there,” said Aunty Olga. “They don’t let everyone in, you know, not even for a visit.” She sounded so grumpy about it that Dasha guessed she had been denied more than once.