The Breathing Sea II - Drowning

by E. P. Clark

  “This is part of the lesson, isn’t it?” she said to him. “To show me how I’m not alone even when I think I am?”

  In truth, little Tsarinovna, that was not the lesson I had in mind, but you seem to have stumbled upon it, so you might as well learn it.

  “What was the lesson you had in mind?”

  Perhaps you will stumble upon that one in time, too. But in the meantime, you have discovered that you are not alone, since there are minnows swimming in the stream. And me, of course.

  “I didn’t mean to leave you out,” she said.

  But you did. So: minnows and me. What else do you have? Who else is with you?

  Dasha looked around again. “There’s not going to be anyone else as long as you’re here,” she told him. “Everyone’s hiding.”

  Look again, little Tsarinovna.

  “If you just told me, I would find them much faster!”

  If I just told you, you would learn nothing. The cub cannot survive forever on kills brought down by her mother. She must learn to bring down game for the pack herself, and to do that she must practice.

  The fact that that was true only made it even more annoying. “I don’t even know what I’m looking for,” Dasha complained.

  You are not ‘looking’ for anything, little Tsarinovna. You are looking to see what is there. Many a cub has gone hungry hunting for hares because she failed to see the squirrels to her right and the downed deer to her left.

  Dasha wanted to argue against that and say that if you didn’t know what you were looking for, you would never find anything at all, but Gray Wolf’s words had the annoying ring of truth to them once again, so she bit her lip and told herself to stop wasting time bandying words with him when she could be looking for whatever it was he wanted her to find and learning whatever it was he wanted her to learn. Except that he’d just admitted this wasn’t even the lesson he’d planned for her anyway! What kind of teaching was this! She was never going to make it out of here and back to her companions at the sanctuary!

  A sudden twittering just above her made her instinctively duck her head.

  I think you have little to fear from crossbills, little Tsarinovna, said Gray Wolf, sounding even more amused than before. Dasha looked above her. Sure enough, a yellow and gray crossbill had come out of hiding and had fluttered to a neighboring tree, where she was enthusiastically searching for cones and the seeds they contained.

  “I didn’t know it was just a little bird!” Dasha defended herself.

  Gray Wolf said nothing, merely grinning at her some more. Dasha resisted the temptation to stamp her foot. For one thing, it would only make a squelching noise on the peat, which would not be very impressive, and for another, it might splash her with more peaty water.

  “Should I shut my eyes?” she asked. “Will that help me?”

  You could try it, little Tsarinovna.

  Dasha shut her eyes and tried to concentrate. She should probably be able to send her consciousness out, questing through the trees, till she found…whatever it was she was supposed to find. Something. Anything. But the more she tried to push her consciousness out of her body and send it roving through the forest, the more stubbornly her mind remained rooted inside her head, and the only thing she noticed was that her feet were slowly sinking into the damp peat. She opened her eyes and squelched up off the peat bar and over to the bank proper, where she sat down on some moss. Which was also wet and squelchy. She was wet and squelchy, and her hair had mostly fallen out of its braid and was sticking to her face. How was she supposed to concentrate on anything when she was so uncomfortable! A mosquito came whining up behind her and bit her on the back of her neck before she could slap it away.

  “There are mosquitoes here as well,” she told Gray Wolf.

  You see, little Tsarinovna? You are not alone at all. The forest teems with life.

  “Minnows and mosquitoes! That hardly counts!”

  Oh, well, if you are going to count…then minnows and mosquitoes far outnumber anyone else here. And they certainly count for themselves, even if you are so quick to discount them.

  Once again, that was so annoyingly true that Dasha wanted to shout an angry denial and accuse Gray Wolf of twisting her words, but she could sense that if she did so, she would be the one twisting words, not him. “Very well,” she said. “I am not alone. I still don’t see what that gains me.”

  What it gains you? Why should it gain you anything?

  “You said it was important lesson for me!”

  That is true. And now you know that you are quick to count yourself alone, and discount all the many other lives around you, even though they cannot discount you. See how the mosquitoes swarm around you, seeking food and life! See how the minnows swim away from you when you approach their pool! See how the birds all watch your every move! See how I sit here, speaking with you, instead of going about my business!

  “You chose to be here! I didn’t ask you to come take me away! You did that yourself!”

  True enough, little Tsarinovna. And yet, still I am here with you, rather than pursuing my own ends.

  “If it’s so much trouble for you, then go!”

  And leave you here all alone, just as you feared? Soaking wet, with no way to get back to your food and your boots, let alone your companions?

  “I made my way out of one forest,” Dasha said, more bravely than she felt. “I can make my way out of another. I don’t want to be a burden to you that you don’t want.”

  Gray Wolf looked down at her from his high bank. That is true, little Tsarinovna, he said. You do not wish to be a burden to me, or anyone else. But you will be, because of who you are. Someone must stand at the front, someone must climb to the top, and to do so that person must be lifted up by all the others below her. She cannot get there alone.

  “I don’t want to climb to the top!”

  You lie, little Tsarinovna.

  “I…” Dasha’s voice broke. “I don’t think I can,” she said, looking down at her dirty, peat-covered feet. “I know that everyone wants me to, needs me to, and they’re ready and willing, just like you are, to lift me up, but I…I don’t think I can make the rest of the climb. The bit that I have to do myself. Because no matter how high everyone else raises me, that final scramble I have to make myself, because that’s what the top is: the place where everyone else falls down and slides back to the bottom. Only I’m afraid that I’m going to fall down and slide back to the bottom too, and it will have been a waste of everyone else’s effort to lift me up, and they’ll know, and they’ll be so angry with me…I feel like I’m constantly skirting along the edge of an abyss, an abyss of failure, and…I’m falling in! I can feel it. I can feel my feet slipping and sliding, so that I’m only a half-step away from slithering over the brink and plunging down into the abyss below, taking myself and everyone who helped me down with me. No, don’t tell me that I’m wrong! You told me to find out what I could sense, and this is what I sense, more strongly than anything else! I’m…I’m no good at magic, I’m not good at my gift, and I’m…I’m…I’m afraid that they’re right, everyone’s right, and I really am sick, I really do have the falling sickness, and I’ll…I’ll be locked away for my own good, and one day soon I won’t be able to ride any more, or walk, or talk, and then one day after that I’ll fall into a fit, a real fit, and…that will be that. I’ll be dead without ever having really lived, and worst of all, I’ll let everyone down, pull everyone down with me, not because I was cruel or evil or stupid, but just because I wasn’t quite strong enough to make it to the top.”

  Gray Wolf regarded her silently. Those are all good fears to have, little Tsarinovna, he said abruptly. It is good to fear that you will let your pack down in their time of need. A little such fear keeps pushing you forward, pushing you up, ensuring that what you fear does not come to pass. Those who see nothing but success trip and fall over the first obstacle that meets their feet.

  “Just because I see them doesn’t mean the obstacl
es aren’t there! That doesn’t mean I won’t fail! After all, I see true, or I’m supposed to! Maybe…maybe by seeing it I’m making it come true!”

  That is also possible, little Tsarinovna.

  “So what am I supposed to do! Every way I turn there is danger! If I don’t see the danger, I won’t know to look out for it, and if I do see it, I might be looking for it so hard that I stumble right into it! And I…I don’t know what is true and what is not…I’m supposed to be able to see the truth, and all I do is get mixed up and confused, and so many things seem true, are true, only they’re not, or there’s another truth that’s just as true, and…”

  Little Tsarinovna. Gray Wolf’s voice cut off her ramblings before they could grow any more hysterical. Are you alone here, or not?

  “You just taught me that I wasn’t!”

  But when I first asked you, you said that you were. Were you lying?

  “No. I just…I was thinking about it a different way.”

  So you were telling the truth. And now, if you were to say that you are not alone here, would you be lying?

  “No. But…”

  So both things are true. You are not alone here, and yet you are.

  “They can’t both be true! There’s only one truth! That’s why it’s the truth!”

  Ah, little Tsarinovna, how young you are!

  Dasha glared at him.

  Perhaps there is only one big truth, but if so, it is made up of a million tiny truths, each one different than its sister. You humans worry so much about ‘the truth,’ that big truth, but you spend so little time looking around and seeing all the little truths that form it. You try to make it into something more difficult than it is, something that is separate from you and everything else, as if there is some ‘truth’ somewhere up in the sky, with the sun and the moon and the stars. So you go searching for that Truth, but you keep stumbling over all the little truths at your feet, and before you know it, you’ve fallen into that abyss, the one that haunts you, and you have to climb back out all over again. All because you couldn’t look down at your feet, look down and really see what was there. You are so busy trying to turn what you see into something that—what is it that humans like to say? Something that ‘makes sense,’ except that what humans so often think ‘makes sense’ seems to have so little to do with the senses. You are afraid that you cannot tell the difference between a warning of the abyss, and the abyss itself, little Tsarinovna? A common problem for humans. You spend so much time looking inside your heads that you fail to look out and notice what is right in front of you, you fail to look down and say, ‘Oh, there it is below me, the abyss, see how dark it is, how cold rises up from it, how when I drop a stone off the edge I can hear it falling and falling.’ No, you turn your backs to it, because it doesn’t look the way you think an abyss should look, and while you’re busy shouting to each other that this is not the abyss you have been searching for, see how it does not resemble the pictures of abysses that you drew on birch bark and paper, it does not resemble the descriptions of abysses in your dusty scrolls in your dusty libraries, you all tumble down into it. When all you had to do was turn around and drop a stone off the edge, and listen to it fall.

  “But…” Dasha tried to object, but Gray Wolf overrode her.

  And that is what you have been doing yourself, little Tsarinovna. You, and all those around you, have been so convinced that you know what magic should look like, what your gift should be, that you have failed to see it entirely, and have mistaken it for failure, for an illness instead. You have shut your eyes and stopped your ears to the little truths, and thus failed to see the big truth, even though it has been staring you in the face all this time.

  “But I can’t use my gift!” Dasha burst out, finally managing to break off Gray Wolf’s words. “I can’t tell the difference between the truth and…some other truth. That’s what I’ve been trying to tell you!”

  And what I have been trying to tell you is that you must learn. You must learn to stop trying to stuff all your truths into the same box, and chopping off the bits that don’t fit. You must learn to open your eyes, unstop your ears, to taste, to smell, to feel all the things that you have learned to ignore and discount, till you can tell the true abyss from its warning in your mind. That, if you must know, was the lesson I brought you here to teach you.

  “I…I think I understand,” Dasha said in a small voice. “I think my father tried to tell me the same thing, more or less, when he was teaching me how to fight. And I think…sometimes I can already tell the difference between a true vision and a false one, or a warning. Only half the time I’m still confused! And the more confused I am, the more afraid I am! And these fits…”

  The fits are as they are, Gray Wolf told her. Clear your mind of them. Perhaps they will take you, and perhaps they will not, but that is not our concern. Now step back.

  “I’m sorry?”

  Step back. And with a mighty bound, Gray Wolf leaped off the bank and, clearing the broad stream, which was several horse-lengths wide, landed at Dasha’s side, her discarded things in his mouth.

  Get on my back, little Tsarinovna, he said. Let us leave this place. We still have far to go.

  “We wouldn’t have so far to go if you hadn’t let me dive into the water like that,” Dasha grumbled.

  That was necessary.

  “No it wasn’t!”

  It was, little Tsarinovna. For one thing, I had to see if what I suspected was true, and you would do it.

  “What do you suspect?” asked Dasha, trying and failing to clean off her feet before pulling on her stockings and boots.

  That you still carry that water-maiden within you. That she is guiding you towards the water, as best she can.

  “But…” Dasha made herself not argue with him. “That may be so,” she agreed. “What should I do about it?”

  Right now? Nothing. She is not harming you.

  “She just made me jump into the water!”

  But you are not harmed by it.

  “But I could have been!”

  But you were not. And you need to be drawn to the water. You need what she can give you. And she is not my concern, or under my power. If you wish to learn more of her, speak to the priestesses, the sorceresses. My concern is with that which is real, and alive.

  “But…” Dasha said again, but before she could finish her protest, Gray Wolf told her, Pull on your boots and get on my back, little Tsarinovna. There is still much for you to learn.

  Chapter Eighteen

  They roamed all night, with Dasha clutching at the fur on Gray Wolf’s back to keep from falling off when she grew drowsy. Every few paces Gray Wolf would ask her, What do you sense, little Tsarinovna? What do you sense? and Dasha would answer him. At first she made many more fruitless attempts to stretch out her senses, to reach out and try to catch what was happening around her, but every time, as with the first time, the more she strained, the less she sensed. As the early dawn rose she abandoned her attempts to force her senses out beyond her body, and slumped down, defeated, letting the birdsong come to her.

  Very good, little Tsarinovna, Gray Wolf told her, when she listed all the things she had noticed. You are becoming more observant. You will always be limited by the weakness of your human senses, but you are improving. She thought she could hear a smile in his next words. There is hope for you yet.

  “I wasn’t even trying!”

  No wonder you did so well, then. Come, let us rest here. Gray Wolf stopped in a small glade and deposited Dasha on the ground, before turning around several times and lying down. Come, lie next to me, he told her. It will keep you warm.

  “I’m hungry,” Dasha told him.

  Hungry enough to hunt?

  “No. Hungry enough to eat the bread in my pack that’s probably gone stale by now.” She opened her pack and examined her food stores. There was a loaf of bread that was, just as she had predicted, already going hard. There were some dried apple slices, and a packet of buckwheat.r />
  “How long are we going to be out here?” she asked. “I don’t have very much food with me.”

  It is a good thing you are not alone, then, Tsarinovna. The forest is full of food.

  “Not food I want to eat.”

  Gray Wolf sighed and, Dasha suspected, did whatever the wolf equivalent of rolling his eyes was. For that, he said, I am tempted to keep you here for the rest of the season. Don’t worry so! I will take you to the sanctuary tonight or tomorrow.

  “There’s a big difference between tonight and tomorrow when you’re hungry!”

  Yes. Yes, there is. One that creatures of the wild know all too well. But that does not mean that food will come, or that you will know when it will. You have to be ready, little Tsarinovna, ready for whatever happens.

  “But if I knew what would happen, I could be readier for it! I could make plans!”

  Gray Wolf sighed again. True enough, little Tsarinovna, he said. But life so rarely goes along with such plans.

  “But…”

  I have a plan. Every day, I have a plan. I plan to walk my trails and patrol my woods. That much I can plan. But I cannot plan what may cross my path. I can plan to put myself in the way of prey, but I cannot plan what prey will fall my way. Now don’t argue! Think on what I said, eat your stale bread, and rest. We still have much to do.

  “If I knew what it was I was supposed to do, I could do it faster,” said Dasha.

  True. But if you knew what it was, you would not be out here with me. Now eat and sleep.

  The loaf of bread put up a fierce resistance to Dasha’s attempts to tear into it, but eventually she prevailed and broke it up into gnawable chunks, ignoring as best she could the dirtiness of her hands. She had tried to wash when they had stopped earlier to drink at a stream, but no sooner had she cleaned herself then she had gotten dirty again, and now grime was deeply embedded in the creases of her hands and under her fingernails. The bread still tasted delicious though, stale as it was, and she gulped down several large chunks with almost wolf-like speed before suddenly feeling so full she couldn’t take another bite.