by E. P. Clark
“Take me,” said Oleg suddenly.
You? The cold wind had no face, nor body either, but somehow Dasha could still sense how all its attention had turned to him. You, little man? Why you?
“Because she is my daughter,” said Oleg. “Because she is my daughter, and…I have never been much of a father to her, or any kind of father at all, but now…now is my chance to redeem myself and be the kind of father that she needs.” He glanced over at Dasha for a moment. “The kind of father that both of them deserve.”
Dasha could sense the cold wind contemplating his words. Your lives are not of equal value, little man, it said eventually. It is not an even trade.
“I know,” said Oleg. “I know she is worth more than me.”
The cold wind laughed. Coldly. Worth more? it said. Worth more? How wrong you are, little man, our servant. How wrong you are. You are worth ten of her to us.
“But she is worth ten of me to me,” said Oleg steadily. He glanced over at Dasha again. “They both are. Let my life…let my life buy back both their lives, and the lives of all my daughters.”
The cold wind reached out and licked at his hair and beard, causing it fly around his face. They will still die, it said. Even if we do this thing you ask and spare her, and her, a gust of wind lifted Dasha’s hair from her shoulders and whipped it into her eyes for a moment, before releasing her, and all the others too. They will all still die. If not today, then perhaps tomorrow, or next year, or ten, or twenty, or seventy or eighty years from now. A blink of an eye.
“Maybe a blink of an eye to you,” said Oleg. “But not to them. And not to me either.”
And so what should we do with you, little man? asked the cold wind. Steal the breath from your body? Kill you where you stand? Tell us, little man, what will that gain us? She, Svetochka’s hair lifted up from her head in a gust of wind, and then fell back down in a sudden calm, shrouding her face and shoulders with its fiery locks, will still be alive, will still be wreaking the harm that she wishes to wreak, and we will have lost one of our best, most faithful servants. That does not seem like a good trade to us, little man. That does not seem like justice to us.
“You can do with me as you wish, just as you always have,” said Oleg. “I have no choice in the matter, as you well know. If you wish to steal the breath from my body and kill me where I stand, I cannot stand against you—nor will I try, if it will gain my daughters’ lives. But if that does not please you, then…release me. Release me from your service, and give me back my mortal life. Allow me to fade away, as all humans do.”
Is that what you wish, little man? asked the cold wind. It swirled around him, making his clothes flap against him.
“It is,” said Oleg.
And how will this serve us, little man? How will you leaving our service serve us?
“I…” Oleg’s voice, so strong earlier, now faltered. “Have I not earned this?” he asked.
Earned? The cold wind sounded amused. You do not ‘earn’ things of us, little man. ‘Earning’ this boon or that is a human concept. It is no business of ours.
“It will serve you,” Dasha suddenly blurted out.
What? The cold wind whipped around her now too, so strongly she felt as if her clothes might strangle her. How will it serve us, little girl? it demanded.
“I…I…I can see it,” she said hesitantly. And it was true. There was a vision there, a vision saying that Oleg’s choice was the right one, the one that would save them, but it was just out of her sight, more of a feeling than a vision… “I can see it,” she repeated more firmly.
And what is it you see, little girl? asked the cold wind. What do your visions tell you, little sight-touched girl?
“They tell me…they tell me…they tell me that this is how I will fulfill my part of my mother’s bargain,” she said, speaking more confidently as the vision, or, not so much the vision as the knowledge, came to her more and more clearly. “My father returning to me, to us, to the world of women, as a mortal man, just like the rest of us—this will be what helps me fulfill my part of my mother’s bargain—both their bargain—with you. This is what will help me be the bridge between our world and yours, our lives and yours.”
Is that so, little girl? How?
“I don’t know,” said Dasha. “Not yet. But I know it is true, or it could be, if you allow it.”
And if we don’t, little girl?
“Then…then…” Dasha groped in her visions, trying to see, trying to guess at what would happen, “then it will…it will very likely go wrong. I need this for me to be able to do what needs to be done. What you need me to do. I don’t know how or why yet, but I know it is true.”
So you will trade your life for hers as well? asked the cold wind, riffling Svetochka’s hair again. You both wish to trade your lives for her single, worthless one?
“It isn’t a trade,” said Dasha. “It is a bargain, and a gift, and a solution to your problems and ours.”
The wind gusted again, almost as if the cold wind were sighing in resignation. Very well, it said. As it happens, you are most likely correct, little girl. So be it. And the wind rose up so strongly that Dasha and Oleg were both knocked to their knees, and Dasha could not breathe, could not think, could not even tell up from down…it was gone. The wind was gone as if it had never been, and the air was completely still.
“Oleg!” Dasha cried, crawling over to him, still on her knees. “Father! Are you…are you unhurt?”
Oleg pushed himself up from where he had been half-lying on the ground and sat back on his heels. He held his hands out in front of his face and flexed his fingers.
“You could call me ‘papa,’ you know,” he said.
“Stop it!” She made as if to slap him. “Are you unhurt?”
“I think so,” he said. “But I think…I think they did as I asked. I think they took away my…everything that they had given me. I think I am just a man as any other, now. Mortal.”
“Oh,” said Dasha. “Are you…are you sorry?” she asked.
Svetochka stirred and opened her eyes.
“Not at all,” said Oleg.
***
They made their way slowly back to the village. The tiny domovaya was gone, and even if she had been there, Dasha wouldn’t have wanted to leave the others while she herself was whisked away, so she didn’t call for her. Svetochka was still groggy from whatever the cold wind had done to her, and walked with Aunty Olga on one side of her, and Dasha on the other.
“Why did they do that to me?” she asked at one point. “The gods? Why did they do that to me? What did they want from me?”
“They’re gods,” Dasha said. “It isn’t for us to understand them.”
“You’re lying,” said Svetochka flatly.
“I am not!” protested Dasha.
Aunty Olga gave her a look.
“Fine,” said Dasha. “It is best you hear it from me, and not from anyone else,” she gave Aunty Olga a look back, “who might tell you all kinds of things. They were angry with you for killing Bjorn.”
“Bjorn?” asked Svetochka, confused.
“The…the raider you…you know,” Dasha explained.
“But why? He were a raider! They should be thanking me! Ain’t getting rid of ‘em what they wanted?”
“He…he could have been useful to us,” Dasha said.
“I don’t see how,” Svetochka grumbled. Aunty Olga looked like she wanted to ask how too, but Dasha couldn’t find the words to explain it to them, and the subject was dropped. Dasha felt a worry that the cold wind had been right in its estimation of the danger Svetochka would continue to pose to others, but she still simply couldn’t see herself leaving Svetochka to them. Saving her from what they had had in mind for her had been the right thing to do, and she would just have to pay the price for any consequences that resulted from it.
The sky was still bright blue when they got back to the village, but it was the bright blue of a midsummer evening. Girls were gathering
poppies and other wildflowers in the fields as they drew near the village, weaving them into wreaths. They called out to Dasha and Svetochka to come join them.
“We’ll be floating ‘em in the pond in a bit,” one girl shouted to them. “And some of us will be walking down to the river to go swimming. The boys have already started lighting the bonfires!”
“Is it Midsummer?” Dasha asked.
The girl laughed and pointed up at the sky. “What do you think it is?” she called out merrily. “Midwinter? You must have lost your brains on the road! Of course it’s Midsummer!”
“Of course,” said Dasha. “I don’t think”—she looked around at the others—“we’ll be able to join you, but we thank you for the invitation.”
“Well if you change your mind, you know where to find us!” shouted the girl, and ran off with the others in the direction of a particularly thick clump of poppies.
Back in the village the boys were lighting bonfires in the central square, and the older folk were strolling and drinking. A few people had started dancing and juggling early, their motions already the worse for drink. Several of them called out to Dasha and her companions to join them, but they kept going until they came to the bathhouse, where Susanna was waiting for them. They brought Svetochka inside, despite her protests.
“I’m fine,” she kept saying. “I feel fine. I don’t need a steam!”
“Everyone needs a steam on Midsummer,” Oleg told her, and Aunty Olga nodded emphatically and told her not to be silly, they were all going to steam together.
“I’ve already steamed,” Dasha said. “I’m going to go join the girls at the river.”
“Not by yourself, you’re not,” Oleg told her.
“Well, you can’t go with me,” Dasha told him. “And none of the other guards can either.”
“Take Susanna,” Oleg told her. “She’ll be better than no one. And where is Sister Asya, or Yuliya?”
No one knew where they were, but Susanna said she’d be happy to go with Dasha to the river and see these Zemnian Midsummer rituals, and since they’d already killed all the raiders in the area, they were unlikely to encounter any danger.
“Dasha seems to find danger wherever she goes,” said Oleg.
“And I keep surviving it,” Dasha told him. “I’m the one with the gifts. You’re the one who should be careful now.”
Oleg grimaced at that, but made no move to hinder her as she and Susanna left. They walked around the pond, where the little girls were already gathering, playing with their wreaths and giggling and shoving each other. One girl was pushed right into the pond with a loud splash, and soon all the other girls were plopping in after her.
Dasha and Susanna kept walking, leaving the village houses behind them and going out into the fields. On the edge of the farthest field a group had lit an especially large bonfire and was standing around it.
“Why is the fire so big?” Susanna asked. She sniffed. “They must be cooking something.”
“I don’t think they’re cooking anything,” Dasha said. She wanted to turn around and run the other way, but her legs kept carrying her along the field, in the direction of the huge bonfire.
“Then what are they…the raiders! They are burning their bodies!”
“Most likely,” said Dasha.
“Let us go! Let us go watch them burn! It is good to watch your enemy’s body burn.”
“Mmmm,” said Dasha, but she followed Susanna, not because she wanted to watch anybody’s body burn, but because she felt—no, she knew—she had to do this, she owed it to Bjorn and the others to stand there and watch their bodies and the future she had seen burn to ash and blow away.
The smoke rising from the funeral pyre was dark and oily, and gave off a strong smell of roasting pork. Dasha had been afraid of what she would see, afraid that she would see Bjorn’s flesh burning in truth, as she had seen it in her vision when she had first touched him at the cabin, but the smoke and the flames were so strong that she was easily able to stay back and avoid looking into the heart of the fire. Sister Asya was there, and Yuliya, and Birgit, along with half a dozen older women from the village.
“Tsarinovna,” said Sister Asya, coming over to greet her. “Are you here to honor the dead?”
“You don’t think that’s strange?” Dasha asked. “You don’t think that’s wrong of me?”
“The dead are dead, Tsarinovna. The only thing we can do for them is honor them, and the only thing they can do to us is reproach us for our failures. They will only haunt us if we let them. It matters not who they were in their lives; now they are the dead, and should be treated as such. After all, one day we will be one with them, just as they are now one with the world.”
“That sounds…frightening,” said Dasha. She shivered as visions appeared before her, showing her all the lives and deaths of Zem’ and all the lands beyond Zem’ and all the lives that washed through them in great waves of life and death and life in death, and how these waves were washing over her even as they spoke.
“Frightening?” said Sister Asya. “I suppose it is. And wonderful. The world is so full of wonder and terror, Tsarinovna. And we are all a part of it. We are all lifted by its waves, whether we will it or no. We think we can stand apart, that we can stand above it and command it from the outside, but no one can. You have to become one with it if you don’t want it to catch you and dash you against the bottom, smashing you on the rocks and drowning you under its weight. And you can’t do it by fighting it, by refusing to understand it, by turning away from it. You have to jump in, to immerse yourself in it, and swim through and come out the other side. Only then will you be able to overcome it. And even then you will not overcome, only learn to live with it in enough harmony that it will not overcome you.”
“I suppose so,” said Dasha. “Why are you burning them rather than burying them?”
“Burying bodies is hard work, Tsarinovna. Wood had already been gathered for a fire; we merely took some of it. And Yuliya and Birgit both told us that burning is the way of their people. We thought we would give them that much, at least. Let them be sent into their next life, into the next world, as they would have had they died amongst their own people.”
“And they”—Dasha nodded at the village women—“didn’t object? They didn’t mind honoring them like this?”
Sister Asya smiled. “Once you have seen death a few times, Tsarinovna, you learn to be merciful to those whom it has taken, if you are capable of learning anything at all.”
“They was just boys far from home,” agreed one of the other women, coming over to join them. “That could have been our sons, an’ maybe it will be soon, if what we hear about a war coming is true. I’d like to think that if any of our boys gets cut down far from home, some other boy’s mother would do the same for him.” She bowed. “Tsarinovna,” she added. “They say you’re the Tsarinovna?”
“Yes,” Dasha told her. “Thank you.”
“For what, Tsarinovna?”
“For taking care of them like this. It should have been me. I should have been the one to do it. Only I don’t know if I could have…I don’t know if I could have faced it…I don’t know if I’m strong enough…”
The village woman looked into her face. “The strength comes when you need it, Tsarinovna,” she told her. “We never think we’re strong enough, we never know how we’re going to get through something, till we do. When my husband died, I didn’t know how I was going to survive his death, and I didn’t think I could lay him out, or bury him, or carry on after his death, but I did all those things. We all do. We’re as strong as we have to be, ‘cause there ain’t any other choice.”
“Birgit says,” said Sister Asya, “that amongst their people, they send gifts and sacrifices off with the dead on their funeral pyres. You should send something, Tsarinovna.”
“What?” asked Dasha. “I don’t have anything.”
“That ribbon in your hair would be enough, Tsarinovna. It would be like sending o
ff a prayer. Throw it into the pyre. You will be glad you did.”
Dasha undid her braid and pulled out the blue ribbon, now very faded and soiled, that had been braided into it and used to tie it off. Holding it clutched in her hand, she inched over towards the pyre, repulsed by the heat and by her fear of what she would see. Was that a limb? A face? Was that the face of someone she knew, being eaten by flames? Would she see this behind her eyelids every night before she fell asleep? Her own face averted, she tossed the ribbon towards the fire, expecting it to fall short. But a draft caught it and it flew high above the flames for an instant, before catching fire and disintegrating into ash that showered down onto the fire and what was lying inside it.
“Very good, Tsarinovna,” said Sister Asya softly, laying her hand on Dasha’s shoulder. Yuliya came over to stand at her other side, and Birgit came over to hover close.
“The gods heard your prayer, Tsarinovna, I’m sure of it,” Yuliya told her.
“It wasn’t for them,” Dasha said. “But maybe they heard it anyway.”
“Maybe so,” said Sister Asya. “Now go. Go join the other girls at the river. We old women will keep watch here. This is no place for the young.”
“You’re not so old,” Dasha said.
Sister Asya smiled. “Older than you think, Tsarinovna. Old enough to be here instead of there. Now go! And take Susanna with you. Show her how we celebrate Midsummer here in the North. Perhaps she will think better of us once she sees it.”
“I do not think so,” said Susanna, and talked at length as she and Dasha walked around the fields of ripening wheat about what they did back in Avkhazovskoye for Midsummer, which mostly involved jumping over bonfires and telling fortunes about your future husband. It was also considered a good time to steal a husband.
“You still do that?” Dasha asked, astounded.
