by E. P. Clark
“NO!” Dasha screamed, the force of her cry making her feel as if her gasping lungs had been torn in two. “No, no, no!” she sobbed, realizing that no one could hear her, no one could see her, no one even knew that she was there. She had to stop them, she had to stop them, but how? Set all of them on fire, even Vladya, even her father, even her own sister?
Don’t look, Tsarinovna, said a voice in her head, and then a heavy weight bore her to the ground.
***
Dasha struggled out from under the weight that was holding her down as if from out of a wide river with high banks.
How long was I out? she asked.
Long enough, Tsarinovna, Gray Wolf told her, his voiceless voice full of sorrow.
She looked around. Fire was licking up one wall of a nearby hut. The sun was just peeping over the edge of the horizon, spreading long rosy fingers before it. There was a pile of bodies lying in a heap on the road, with a circle of figures standing around it. One of the bodies in the pile stirred.
Dasha pulled herself to her feet, using Gray Wolf’s fur as a handhold. “Why did you do it?” she asked. “Why did you stop me?” Her voice rose to a shout. “Why did you stop me?!”
Sometimes I can see the future too, Tsarinovna. And the future in which I didn’t stop you would have been even worse than this future in which I did. You would have…done terrible things, things that could never be undone.
“Terrible things that can never be undone have already been done,” said Dasha, her eyes fixed on the feebly stirring figure on the ground. “Help me over there.”
You do not want to see this, Tsarinovna,
“No, I don’t,” Dasha agreed. “But I must anyway. Help me over.”
Gray Wolf began moving slowly, keeping pace with Dasha’s trembling legs, which seemed to have lost all their strength, spent on her mad dash through the woods and fields. Half of her wanted to rush towards the pile of the bodies, and half of her wanted to bury her face in Gray Wolf’s fur and never look out again. But instead of doing either, she made her slow faltering way to where the others were waiting.
“Dasha!” Oleg caught sight of her and came running over. “Dasha! You’re alive! You’re”—he grabbed her by the shoulders and looked her up and down—“you’re unhurt!” He looked at her more closely. “You are unhurt, aren’t you?”
“I don’t know,” Dasha told him, wriggling out of his grasp and beginning her slow walk again. “Let me go. I have to go to them. What did you do?”
“We came for you, Dasha, as soon as we realized what had happened…Vladya and Svetochka confessed it all.” His face darkened. “Those little fools! But it was the domoviye who took you, wasn’t it? The domoviye…we didn’t know where to go, where to turn, but then we thought—it was Vladya’s idea, actually—to go to the cabin, and we found your tracks, we found the traces of what had happened there, and we took off after you, we’ve been racing after you ever since…I begged Gray Wolf and the other spirits for help, but they wouldn’t, they told me it wasn’t time yet, they wouldn’t help, they wouldn’t help…until finally, finally…”
They reached the pile of bodies. Some of them were groaning and moving painfully, and some of them were so still Dasha knew they would never move again. Her eyes found Bjorn. He had pulled himself painfully over to the wall of a hut, and had propped himself against it. Both his hands were pressed over a wound under his arm. When he saw her, he grinned.
“I was the one who did it!” Svetochka told her, coming to walk next to Dasha as she forced her buckling knees to carry her towards him. Svetochka’s eyes were shining, her whole face was shining, so that she looked almost pretty. Dasha had never thought about it exactly in those terms before, but even though she and Svetochka looked so much alike no one would ever mistake them for anything other than sisters, she, Dasha, was pretty, and Svetochka was not. Yet another way in which the gods had cheated Svetochka and given to Dasha with a liberal hand. “I was the one who got him!” Svetochka told her, sounding as pleased as if she had just won a great race, or earned a thousand chervontsev through her own cunning. “I saw him running after the others, an’ then he saw me, an’ he musta I thought I were you, ‘cause he said ‘Dasha’ like he were surprised or something, an’ raised his hands like he wanted to grab me, an’ I drove my sword right into him. Your sword, actually. I picked it up after you dropped it. Do you want it back?”
“You keep it,” Dasha told her. She knelt down beside Bjorn. Blood had soaked his shirt, and all down the left side of his trousers and even into his boot, spilling out onto the ground, taking her future with it. “Hasn’t anything been done to treat him?” she asked. “Are there no healers here? Summon a healer!”
“A waste of time,” Svetochka told her. “Bleeding like that can’t be stopped. And why do you care? Let him die. He’s hurt you enough already. But he won’t hurt you any more. He won’t hurt any of us ever again. I took care of that!”
“Yes,” said Dasha. “Go summon a healer in any case. Go!” She put her hands over the wound as Svetochka left. Bjorn groaned, and then bit his lip and tried to smile at her. He said something to her in his own language, but could only get a few words out before he started to cough. When he had finished, bubbles of blood stood out on his lips.
“No!” said Dasha, pressing her hands harder on the wound, trying to stanch the bleeding, even though she knew it was the bleeding inside, the bleeding she couldn’t reach, that was killing him. She didn’t need her gifts to see that he had very little time left, a matter only of heartbeats, each one carrying away a little more of his life, and soon he would no longer be this man sitting and looking at her, but…what? Something else entirely. A ray from the rising sun came over the roof behind her, and struck his head, lighting his dirty blondish hair and turning it to gold. In a few more heartbeats the rest of him would be that sunbeam, that bright glint of gold. It seemed impossible that he should die, that he should be transformed like that, and she would be unable to stop it or follow. She had never hated herself and her worthless gifts more. If she had been given the gift of healing instead of this hateful foresight…! But she couldn’t even heal herself, let alone someone else. If only he didn’t have to die! She tried to tell herself that there was still hope, that it wasn’t inevitable, but her cursed sight told her that he was condemned as surely as a man being led out to the block or a bullock being led to slaughter.
“I told you not to go!” Dasha cried out at him. “I told you not to go!”
“Yes,” he said. He let go of his wound, leaving it to Dasha to stem the flow of blood as best she could, and put his hands on her forearms, staining them with blood. He started to speak again, but each word came out as no more than a gasp, and Dasha couldn’t have understood them anyway. If only Yuliya were there! If only…
Let me, Tsarinovna.
You can hear his thoughts? You speak his language?
The language of thoughts is always the same. I understand him well enough. He and I are not so different, after all.
Can you heal him?! Please say that you can heal him, like you healed me! You have the power of the gods within you! You can heal him!
I am sorry, Tsarinovna, said Gray Wolf, shaking his huge head slowly. I have no true skill in healing. I cannot stop such mortal bleeding. I take life, not give it.
Then who can heal him? There must be someone!
There is not, Tsarinovna. The gift of healing is the rarest and most precious of gifts. There is no one here who has it. The only thing you can do is listen to his words before he can no longer speak them.
Then what does he want to say?!
Gray Wolf stood over them for a moment, his head cocked as if listening, and then he said, He wants you to know that you would have made a good wife, a good queen. And you will someday, just not for him. And he is sorry. He knows what you saw by the curse tree. He could see a little of it too. It was a good future, and he wishes he could have shared it with you. But there were parts of it that were n
ot so good, too. In the end, you would have made him bow down to you, you would have made him less than a man.
I would not!!
Not perhaps as you see, but as he sees it, yes. He would have bought that future, and that future for his people, at the price of bowing down to another, to a foreigner, to a woman, and that is something no man could bear.
You don’t mean to say he ruined everything because he was too proud to kneel! Dasha gave Bjorn an angry look. “I’d slap you if I thought you could take it,” she told him.
He laughed painfully, evidently guessing her meaning even if he couldn’t understand her words.
He thinks you are already proving him right, Gray Wolf told her.
“Well, what of it?” Dasha said out loud. “There are worse things than bowing down and kneeling. I don’t think I want a real man, if this is what being one means. And besides, he would have looked good at my feet.”
Gray Wolf gaped open his huge mouth to laugh at that, and he must have relayed what she had said to Bjorn, for after a moment he laughed a choking, painful laugh as well, before falling silent, his eyes resting on her in a smile that seemed to be looking right through her and on to something beyond, something she couldn’t see, maybe that ray of light that he would soon become.
He thinks that perhaps you are right, Gray Wolf told her. It is a shame neither of you will ever find out. But he wants you to know that there are worse things than death, too. You are young, and have never known real pain and suffering, he can tell. Because if you had, you would understand that already. You would know that it doesn’t do to cling to life too hard, that there are times when it is worth risking your life, or even losing it, for things that last longer than our short lives, which flash in and out of existence like raindrops falling from the sky and losing themselves on the ground. But he says that if he had to, he would have learned to kneel for you. Perhaps it wouldn’t even be so bad. And he ran after the others not to join them, but to stop them. Because he could see just as clearly as you that no good would ever come of this ill-thought-out raid. And it didn’t. He couldn’t have stayed behind and done nothing, because what kind of man would he have been then? So he ran after them to stop them, and was cut down by your sister. And perhaps that was for the best. The soothsayers said when he was a child that he would die in battle, and that he would be brought low by a woman, and die in a woman’s arms. How right they were. But if it gives you comfort, you can know that the hand that truly brought him low was your own, because he would have knelt for you if you had demanded it.
“That brings me no comfort at all!” Dasha cried out.
Then allow him the final comfort of dying in a woman’s arms, as was promised.
“No!” cried Dasha, but Bjorn groaned and convulsed, falling into her arms. She tried to put her hands back on the wound, to catch the blood as it came pulsing out of the hole in his side, but he said something she knew meant, “Leave it,” before groaning again and twitching all over, his breath catching in a horrible choking sound she knew would haunt her for years to come. His face buried into her breasts, and she felt one breath, a second, a third, and then nothing. He was gone, taking their future with him.
Chapter Thirty-Three
Her father came and tried to drag her away, but Gray Wolf stopped him. She stayed like that till the sun was high in the sky and it was almost morning, when she suddenly realized that Bjorn’s body was cooling and stiffening, and she pushed it away and staggered back in horror. The sight of it lying there on the ground, stinking of congealing blood like soiled bloodcloths, made her whirl away and retch up bile, which was all that was left in her aching stomach. Then she realized that her clothes, her very skin, were covered with mud and blood and reeked of it also, and she started retching again, until she collapsed onto her knees, shaking and unable to rise.
It was Vladya who came to her. “Get up,” she said, her hands firm and unshrinking on Dasha’s filthy shoulders. “Get up. You’re not doing yourself or anyone else any good, flopping around on the ground like that. Get up.”
“I can’t,” Dasha said. “My legs don’t work. I’ve been running and running, no food, no water…”
“Wait here, then,” said Vladya, and disappeared.
She returned a moment later with a wooden jug of water, which she let Dasha sip from before using the rest of it to wash off her face and hands.
“You need to wash in a stream, and then steam,” Vladya told her, eying her critically. “And those clothes should be burnt. But this will have to do for now. Here. Take this pie.”
Dasha took the pie out of her hand. It had been baked the day before. Her stomach roiled at the sight of it. She took a bite anyway. It was filled with sorrel and honey, and was either the worst or the best thing she had ever eaten. The taste covered up the stench of drying blood somewhat, at least, which seemed to have caught in the back of her throat. Dasha finished the rest of the pie, and allowed Vladya to give her more water.
“Do you feel stronger?” Vladya asked her.
“I feel sleepy,” Dasha told her.
“Then sleep here,” Vladya told her. “No, not here, not where you can see…come here. Over here, where it’s quiet and you can’t see…anything. That’s it. Just lean against this wall, and rest. You’ll feel stronger in a bit, once the food has soaked in. You’re safe now; just rest.”
“I was always safe,” Dasha tried to tell her, but Vladya had already gone off without hearing her.
Dasha closed her eyes and dozed in the warm sun. It must be nearly breakfast time. Well, she had taken care of that. It must be nearly Midsummer, as well. Would they celebrate Midsummer on the road? As you spent Midsummer or Midwinter, that was how your year would go, or so they said. Spending it on the road was not considered a good thing. But her year could hardly get any worse, could it? Dasha’s belly twisted, and she wondered if her moonblood was starting. More blood…her belly twisted again, and she almost spewed up all her breakfast. She swallowed it down and sat very still until everything settled and she dropped off to sleep.
***
When she awoke, Yuliya was sitting beside her.
“Vladislava Vasilisovna asked me to keep an eye on you, Tsarinovna,” she explained. “And help you when you awoke. How do you feel?”
“Terrible,” Dasha told her. “How about you?”
“Also terrible, Tsarinovna,” Yuliya answered. “As you’d expect.” They both almost smiled at each other.
“We should get you in the bathhouse, Tsarinovna,” Yuliya continued. “They’re heating it now. The villagers are terribly grateful for what we’ve done for them.”
“What did we do for them?” Dasha asked.
“Why, save them from the raiders, Tsarinovna. Well, not us, of course. Your father and Vladislava Vasilisovna and the rest of them. They were tracking us, just as we knew they would be, and they came to the village last night and stopped there to ask if they’d seen any sign of us there. They hadn’t, but they stopped there for a rest anyway, and were there when the raid happened, and were able to stop it. Half the raiders were killed, and the others driven off into the woods. They’re planning to go hunt them now.”
“Oh,” said Dasha.
“And…I’m sorry, Tsarinovna. For what happened. To…him. I know what you…you saw a future for the both of you.”
“Yes,” said Dasha. “Well, too late for that now.”
“It’s for the best, you know, Tsarinovna,” Yuliya told her earnestly. “You might have thought you could take him as a husband, but you wouldn’t have liked what you would have gotten if you’d done so. Most women who take foreigners as husbands don’t. The gods know I didn’t!” She smiled mirthlessly. “He might have turned your head with his flattery…”
“He didn’t,” Dasha interrupted her. “It wasn’t about that.”
“It’s nothing to be ashamed of, Tsarinovna,” Yuliya told her. “Well, it is, but it happens to many a woman. It starts because we think we need to be free
of our mothers, and maybe that’s true, and we think we’ll find ourselves by running after some man, and maybe that’s true too, but not how we think it is. We know we should love the men who are kind and good, but all too often we love the ones who are brash and violent and overbearing and wrong in every way. Because they’re not like us, and we think we can tame them, save them from themselves—the gods know they need it—while taking on some of that brashness and courage for ourselves. And sometimes we can, and maybe we need to. Learn to be more like them, that is, and save them and all the rest of us from themselves. But sometimes we can’t, and we get hurt in the process. Like soldiers going into battle, thinking they will win a glorious victory. And sometimes they do, although battle isn’t so glorious when you’re in it, as you’ve seen yourself. And sometimes they don’t. It’s the same for us, we women who were never meant to hold a sword, who fight our battles elsewhere. The world needs us too, even more than it needs heroes and brave soldiers and glorious victories, but all too many of us are sacrificed in our vain attempts to make the world a little bit better for others, and others a little bit better for the world. What I mean is—I’m talking such a lot here, but someone needs to say this to you, you need to hear this from some older woman, because we all know it but most of us are ashamed to admit it—what I’m trying to say is any girl would have fallen a little bit in love with him if she had been in your place, no matter how strange and wrong and horrible that might seem to someone on the outside, someone who wasn’t in the middle of it, but it’s because every girl is a little bit of a hero, and if you could have saved him from himself and others from him, that would have been a great victory and an act of heroism that would have been greater than all the battles any soldier has ever won.”
“I know,” said Dasha. “I know what you mean. I wasn’t in love with him—how could I have been? I didn’t know much of him, and what I did was mostly bad—but I was in love with the future we could have had, I admit it freely. I was in love with the chance to be a hero, and to do something great. And he was right, you know,” she added. “That he would make me a real woman. I wasn’t lying when I told him he was right about that. I could see it. It was one of the possibilities that I saw. Not in the way he meant—not that crudeness—but because if that future had come to pass, I would have been a queen over two peoples and had to reconcile them, to bring them together, and that would have made a woman out of me, instead of a silly, shrinking little girl, as nothing else would. But this…this will make a woman out of me as well. This sorrow, this sacrifice, this struggle—this will do almost as well.”
