The Breathing Sea II - Drowning

by E. P. Clark

  “Of course! As you do on the steppe. Of course it is not really stealing. Most husbands know about it beforehand and help arrange it. Of course, some of them complain afterwards. They say it was a trick, and they do not want to stay married. But you know how men are!”

  “Yes,” said Dasha. The sky overhead was a deep, deep blue, with stars coming out here and there, but it was still light enough to make out the green of the wheat and the hay of the fields, and the blackness of the dirt of the path they were following. The scent of ripening grain and grass in the warm sun was beginning to overpower the smell of roasting flesh that was coming from the funeral pyre, and there was the faint hint of water up ahead.

  The hayfield they were walking along ended abruptly in bluffs overlooking the river, which curled away bluely in both directions. Dasha could see for versts and versts out across the fields and then the woods that stretched out away from the other side of the river, and she felt as if she were flying. Laughter from the girls swimming in the river floated up to them from below.

  “Come on,” said Dasha, and led Susanna along a narrow winding path that ran down from the top of the bluff to the narrow sand bank that was the river shore. The other girls caught sight of them and came swimming over, laughing and calling to them to shed their clothes and join them in the water.

  “I do not like to swim,” said Susanna.

  “Then wade!” cried one of the girls, the one who had shouted at them from the field earlier. “Grab a wreath! We made extra.”

  Susanna and Dasha each took one of the wreaths lying by the pile of clothes on the sand bank, and stepped into the muddy river water. There was a thin layer of warm water right at the top, with a thicker layer of cold water beneath it, and cold mud that squidged through their toes at the bottom. The ground fell away swiftly as they walked out into the water, so that soon they were up to their knees in it, and then their waists, and then Dasha kicked off and started swimming out to several of the other girls who were floating out in the middle of the river, while Susanna stayed back with the group that was bobbing in water that was still just shallow enough to allow them to put their feet down on the bottom if they needed to.

  “They say you’re the Tsarinovna,” said the talkative girl, when Dasha joined them. “That true?”

  “It is,” Dasha confirmed.

  The talkative girl looked her up and down. “You look like any other girl,” she remarked.

  “I know,” said Dasha. “Funny thing, isn’t it?”

  The girl laughed at that. She had reddish curly hair, rather like Dasha’s, and skin covered in golden freckles. Her eyes were blue-gray and round, and, Dasha could now recognize, had a distinctively Western cast to them. How many here were half-Western? How many here were the children that Dasha might have had, had the future she had seen come true? For a moment Dasha had the strong sensation that she was looking at the daughter she might have had, even though the girl looked to be older than she was.

  “I’m Pelageya,” the girl told her. “Polya.”

  “Dasha,” said Dasha.

  “You like to swim, don’t you?” said Polya. “I can tell. Me too! Come on! Let’s swim down to that inlet over there, where the willow is.” She took off without waiting for Dasha to answer, kicking strongly and holding her wreath. Dasha followed, also holding onto her wreath, and was surprised to discover that she could keep pace with her easily.

  “None of the other girls have come,” she said, once they had reached the inlet on the other side of the river and pulled themselves onto the roots of the willow tree that was growing out of the side of the bank, threatening to fall in if the water ate away any more of the shore.

  “They’re all afraid!” Polya told her cheerfully. “They think this spot is haunted by a water-maiden!”

  “Is it?” Dasha asked.

  “She’s never shown herself to me! Sometimes I come looking for her, but I ain’t found her yet!” Polya burst out laughing at the thought. “I ain’t afraid of water-maidens,” she told Dasha. “Sometimes I think I am one, I just don’t know it! I love the water more ‘n anything. I swim every day all summer. ‘Are you sure you ain’t a vodyanaya?’ my mother says to me. And maybe she’s right! Someday I’d like to see the sea, wouldn’t you?”

  “Yes,” said Dasha. “Maybe you will, someday. Maybe you’ll leave here, and go to Pristanograd.”

  “Maybe so!” said Polya enthusiastically. “An’ find myself a handsome husband there! Let’s cast our wreaths into the water, an’ see what they tell us about our husbands.” In one impulsive motion she tossed her wreath into the water. They both watched as it floated downstream.

  “Go right!” Polya called to it. “If it goes right, it means you’ll be wed soon,” she told Dasha. “An’ your husband’ll be handsome. Go right, go right, go right!”

  The wreath, caught in the current, floated out into the center of the river, and then, caught in an eddy, drifted very slightly to the right for an instant.

  “Hurray!” cried Polya in excitement. “Now you, Dasha!”

  “I don’t know if it will work for me,” Dasha said. “I didn’t make this wreath myself.”

  “If it goes right, it worked, and if it goes left, it didn’t,” Polya told her authoritatively. “Cast it into the current!”

  Dasha tossed her wreath into the current. Like Polya’s, it floated out into the center of the river, and then, just as it was disappearing from sight around a bend, drifted slightly to the right. Polya cheered, and Dasha found herself smiling in spite of herself. It didn’t mean anything…and yet somehow it did. Maybe she would be wed soon, and to a handsome husband, even if it seemed difficult to envision right now. Maybe there would be other, better futures to replace the one she had lost. Not that that made it any better for those who had lost all their futures. But it was still something.

  “What was that?!” shrieked Polya, and then giggled. “I thought I felt something cold touch me!” she said. “Maybe it’s a vodyanaya!”

  Dasha peered down into the water, but could make out nothing but mud. “Probably just a fish,” she said. Something touched her leg then, and she jumped and shivered. “A fish,” she repeated firmly.

  “Or a vodyanaya!” insisted Polya. “They come out on Midsummer, you know.”

  “Or a vodyanaya,” agreed Dasha. There was a glooping noise, and rings began rippling out from where something had dived into the water. She thought she caught a glimpse of something large and frog-like peer back at them, and then there was another glooping noise, followed by more rippling rings. “It’s gone now,” she said.

  Polya giggled again. “An’ now there’s something cold running up my back!” she exclaimed. “A water-maiden for sure!”

  Dasha looked behind them, into the dark under the willow roots. “I don’t see anything,” she said.

  “Your face.” Polya’s voice was low and surprised, losing all its giddiness.

  “What about it?”

  “For a moment I thought…there were something…it were like there were something misty, like mist were all floating out from you…” She shook her head and laughed. “Must be the mist from the river!” she said, sounding like her old self again. “My eyes playing tricks on me! Midsummer tricks!” She shivered. “It is cold here, though,” she added. “Let’s go back to the others now!”

  “Let’s,” agreed Dasha, and followed Polya as she dove off the willow roots and began swimming strongly back across the river, to where the others were splashing each other and singing. The water no longer felt cold to Dasha, and she floated through it easily, cutting across the current without any effort at all. When she rejoined the others, she floated silently on top of the water as they all cast their wreaths into the current and, shrieking and giggling, foretold husbands for each other. When midnight had passed and it came time for them to climb out of the water and make their way towards the glow of the rising sun back to the village, where the bonfires awaited them, her body felt heavy and awkward o
n dry land, and she lagged behind the others as they made their way across the fields, past the funeral pyre, which was now nothing but coals, and to the village square, where the boys greeted them with drunken enthusiasm. It was not until Dasha, following the others, jumped across a bonfire that she felt herself return to her body. By then the sky was white with dawn, and she made her excuses and left the festivities to return to her own group, which was quartered in several of the larger huts.

  “Where were you?” Svetochka asked sleepily, when Dasha slipped into bed beside her.

  “Swimming with the other girls,” Dasha told her.

  “Did you see your future?” Svetochka asked. “Did the signs foretell good fortune?”

  “Maybe so,” Dasha told her.

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  When Dasha got up a little bit later that morning, she appeared to be the only person awake in the entire village. She wandered out of the bathhouse where she, Svetochka, Susanna, Aunty Olga, Sister Asya, Yuliya, and Birgit had spent the night, such as it was, and made her way through the village in search of the horses. She finally found them in a barn on the edge of the village. Poloska nickered at her in greeting and lipped at her hair affectionately, and Chernets pinned back his ears and lunged at her as she walked by. Dasha was glad to see that the journey didn’t seem to have broken his spirit in the slightest. She slipped on Poloska’s halter and led her, making a wide berth around Chernets’s stall, out to graze.

  “Were you worried about me?” Dasha asked Poloska, but Poloska only flicked her ears at her and continued grazing eagerly. It was hot and damp, and mist was rising off the fields all around them. It would be a hot day for riding. Dasha wondered how much farther they had to go to reach Pristanograd. Less than a week, she thought. It was a happy thought, except that it wasn’t. Once they reached Pristanograd, it felt that her grand adventure would be over, and she would be the same silly, weak person she had always been, everything that had happened notwithstanding. Facing down the gods, and spirits, and foreigners, and even her father had been one thing, but at the thought of facing her mother she felt all her new-gained confidence crumble away, so that inside she was just a little girl again.

  Her stomach twisted, and then twisted again even harder. Her moonblood must be starting. As if traveling weren’t difficult enough…there was another painful spasm. It was looking to be a very long day. For a moment Dasha wanted to shout out at the gods that surely she’d had enough, gone through enough, and beg them to take this away, even make her a man if that’s what it would take to rescue her from this curse. But is that what she really wanted? Perhaps this pain was better than being empty and barren inside. Perhaps all this pain was worth it. Another spasm struck her. Perhaps not.

  “Come on,” she told Poloska. “I have to go. But we’ll graze some more later, I promise.”

  Poloska was not mollified by the promise, but she followed Dasha back to the barn anyway, snatching up mouthfuls of grass every few steps and starting playfully at a bird taking flight out of the field. She and Chernets exchanged snorts and squeals as Dasha put her back in her stall, and, with further promises that she would return soon, Dasha rushed off to find her packs and her bloodcloths before she stained her clothing.

  While searching and rummaging around, she woke up Svetochka, who woke up Susanna, and all three of them went out to graze their horses as they waited for everyone else to wake up. Which was not until near midday, by which time Dasha felt ready to go back to bed. But instead she helped everyone gather their things and pack up and saddle the horses, not forgetting to thank their hosts, who pressed them most firmly to stay for another day. But Oleg said he wanted to get to Pristanograd as soon as possible, since the gods alone knew what kind of trouble they would fall into if they tarried, and he wanted to make as much distance down the road as possible, even if it was only ten versts.

  So they set off in the height of the heat of the day, as Dasha’s belly twisted and roiled, and rode through the fields of wheat and hay, the smell rising from the grass and grain. Dasha glanced back at one point, and thought she saw a faint wisp of smoke rising from the funeral pyre. She trained her eyes forwards, and told herself not to look back again. They descended to the river and crossed it at a ford, before entering the comparative cool of the woods. And they did indeed only cover another ten versts or so before coming to a travelers’ cabin and stopping for the night.

  “You don’t think those bears will be out looking for us, do you?” said Aunty Olga, as they brought their things into the cabin.

  “Don’t even think about it,” Oleg told her grimly. “We don’t want to see them.”

  “You don’t think they pose us any danger, do you?”

  “I don’t know,” Oleg answered shortly. “But I do know there’s not much I can do about it any more. So let’s not go summoning trouble! We’ve had more than enough to last us for the rest of the journey, and ten journeys after it, I would think.”

  “I don’t think the bears will bother us,” Dasha said, looking out the window and seeing nothing but the stockade fence surrounding the cabin.

  “Do your visions tell you that?” asked Oleg. His voice softened. “Of course, I forgot. You would know, even if I don’t.”

  “I don’t know,” Dasha told him. “I just don’t think they’re going to bother us, or anything else either.”

  “Sounds like too much to hope for,” said Oleg. “But anything’s possible, I suppose. Come on. Let’s make supper.”

  ***

  Oleg’s pessimistic predictions notwithstanding, they encountered no trouble (other than Dasha’s own private agony, which she kept to herself—at least it wasn’t quite as bad as last month’s) at all the next day, crossing easily through the woods and coming out to more fields, before stopping for the night at a pleasant waystation. And the same thing happened the next day, and the next, and the next, until one day they were only one night away from Pristanograd, and nothing had happened to hinder them the entire way.

  “It makes me nervous,” Oleg confessed with a grin. “After everything, I don’t know that I can take all this ease and good luck.”

  “Cheer up,” Aunty Olga told him bracingly. “We’re due some good luck, and the gods must be watching over us anyway.”

  “Maybe,” said Oleg, not sounding convinced. “But let’s not do anything stupid today in any case, all right?”

  “When would we do something stupid?” said Aunty Olga with a laugh, before mounting up and galloping off, and Oleg cursed as he raced to catch up with her.

  “Olga Vasilisovna is still like a little girl sometimes,” said Susanna, and took off after them. Dasha and Svetochka followed more sedately, escorted by Dmitry Marusyevich, who was shaking his head and smiling at the antics of the others. Svetochka had taken to shadowing Dasha wherever they went, frequently professing her gratitude for Dasha’s gift of her sword and for Dasha’s intervention back in the woods. Dasha had never told her why, exactly, the gods had been angry with her for killing Bjorn, and what she had done to Dasha herself, and Svetochka had been happy enough to blame everything on the gods’ hardheartedness and caprice. She was less sulky and difficult than she had been when they had set off from Krasnograd, but her brush with the gods had stripped her of much of her reticence and doubt. And her newfound boldness was making it very clear to Dasha that, strangely similar as they were in many ways, they would never really be sisters in anything other than blood. Dasha could look at her and see a less pretty, less lucky version of herself, and hear her say things that Dasha so often found herself thinking, and yet, when Dasha tried to find some reciprocity in her, some spark of recognition that they were kindred in spirit as well as surface, more often than not all she encountered was blank incomprehension. They were bound, they were kin, but they could never be truly joined as one kind.

  That was proven yet again that evening, when they stopped to rest at a village where hideous screaming greeted them as they came riding in. For a moment they ha
d thought that the village was under attack by raiders, but then they discovered that it was lambs being slaughtered.

  “This one’s a screamer,” the man wielding the knife laughed as the last one staggered, sounding like a frightened child as she bleated with terror and despair, and then collapsed next to the bodies of her sisters. Still laughing, the man and his helpers all looked up at Dasha and her group as they came riding over.

  “Don’t screw up your face like that, little sister,” the man told Dasha. “You’ll eat the meat quick enough when we offer it to you.”

  “No thank you,” Dasha told him. “I have taken an oath with the gods to harm no living thing.”

  The man laughed loudly. “Girls take all sorts of freaks in their heads at your age,” he told her. “You’ll get over it quick enough.”

  “Perhaps, but the gods will not,” Dasha told him.

  He laughed again, this time tinged with irritation and fear. “Noblewomen,” he said to the other men helping him. “Always wanting to be special, eh?”

  Everyone laughed, even many of the members of Dasha’s party.

  “Stop being so selfish!” Svetochka hissed at Dasha, as if she had never defended her from others over this very thing. “You always have to be so selfish! Why do you always have to be so selfish!”

  Dasha’s spine tingled, and then her hands, and she could see sparks jumping from finger to finger. She tried to look away from how the other men were now skinning and dismembering the bodies while the first man gave her father directions to the house of someone who might be willing to take them in for the night, and then she made herself look back at what they were doing. Compared to what they had already done it was nothing, anyway: the real crime had already been committed, and there was no taking it back. The men were all laughing and talking with the joyful excitement that came from killing and cruelty. If she could just place her hands over the hearts of these smiling people, who meant so well and did so ill, and burn out the cruelty and evil from them until…until there was no more left of them than there was of Bjorn and all the raiders who had been burnt on the funeral pyre, because that was what it would take. They could no more be purged forcibly of evil than they could be stripped forcibly of their flesh, she saw that so clearly as she stood there, receiving their complaints and accusations, their only shield against the mirror she had thoughtlessly held up to them. They were the same as the lambs they were dismembering, and couldn’t be dismembered without dying either. No matter how nobly she thought she was acting, no matter how lofty her ends were, the means always were the ends, and if she were to curse them as they deserved, she would be the curse she was working, not the salvation she was aiming for. The best she could hope for was to be the one who stood in front and led the way, and perhaps then some of them would, instead of being drained and dismembered by life and all the people in it, grow into better versions of themselves, the versions they could be if they could stop trying to live as wolves, and learn to live as women. Dasha saw all that in a flash, as the others, even those who counted themselves as her friends, continued to laugh and rail against her.