The Breathing Sea II - Drowning

by E. P. Clark

  “And yet they cared so much about what…whatever the person standing next to them happened to think! They cared so much about that, and so little about anyone’s actual suffering! They were like sheep, but only half developed! Like they had only gotten one side of a sheep’s soul, the side that makes them all face the same direction! They would agree to whatever the person who happened to be standing next to them said, but they couldn’t seem to feel what I felt at all! They were too soft and too blind, all at the same time! No backbone and no heart either!”

  “I know, my dear, I know.” Her mother reached out and wiped some of the tears off her face. “I know it all too well. And you are right: they do care too much about whatever the person who happens to be standing next to them might think or do—like sheep, although for sheep they feel nothing, no more than they do for women. But you see, my dear, our gift, the gift that allows us to feel what others do not, is from the same source. Just as all these half-blind, uncaring people around us are so attuned to what their neighbors think and do, so are we attuned to what they feel. It is the same gift, my dear, but grown to enormous proportions. I have long been convinced that it is not ‘magic’ at all, but the ordinary abilities of ordinary women, magnified a hundred times over.”

  “That doesn’t help me!” Dasha cried.

  “Not right now, perhaps, my dear, but it could. If you think about it that way, you might feel less alone.”

  “I don’t want to not be alone! I don’t want to have anything in common with them! I don’t have anything in common with them!”

  “Of course that’s how it seems, my dear. Sometimes I don’t see very much in common between myself and the wretched peasants—many of whom live in palaces and wear gold headdresses and sit on the Princess Council—I rule, but that’s just blindness. We all have something in common with each other, and the birds and the beasts and the trees that grow around us. We all have very much in common, and that is why it is so painful. That is why you can feel so deeply for them. To some it looks like weakness, but it’s not. Only the strong can stand it.”

  “I wanted to be strong,” Dasha said. “Oleg told me I was big and strong like him. And I wanted that to be true. I wanted to be big and strong and tough like him, like a man, but in the end I was just myself.”

  Her mother laughed. “Show me a man who can take the pain of moonblood, and I’ll agree with you. But until then, I’m afraid ourselves is all we can be.”

  “So what should I do about it? How can I make it stop?”

  “You can no more make it stop than you can stop the visions that crowd around your sight, my dear. It is a part of you, perhaps the best and noblest part.” Her mother held up her hand to forestall her objection. “I know it may not seem like it, but it is. Without it, you would be cut off from the rest of the world, dead. Pain is something we all share. Those whom you so despise—this is what they can’t see. They are so overwhelmed by their own suffering that they can’t see the suffering of anyone else, they can’t stand to see the suffering of anyone else, and yet they need it to drown out their own. So they hurt others and tell themselves what they’re causing isn’t pain.”

  “So what can I do?” Dasha demanded again. “I can’t change them!”

  “Not as much or as quickly as you might like, my dear, but maybe enough to make the world a little bit better when you leave it than it was when you came into it. Which is all any of us can do, my love, even Empresses. Which is what you one day will be, and will have the power of both example and law over your entire land.”

  “Example doesn’t seem to have much effect, and I don’t think law would work either,” said Dasha. “I think right now law would just make them worse.”

  “I fear you are right, my dear, but example…example is a powerful thing, more powerful than it seems at first sight. After all, one sheep has to face a certain way for all the other sheep to do the same. Sometimes that is all that we sheep can do. Perhaps that is what your gift is for: to see which we should face, and point us in that direction.”

  “But it’s nothing more than fits and visions! Hardly more than a dream!”

  “And do dreams not have power? Perhaps you must give them a dream worth dreaming, my love. Turn Zem’ into a dreaming land, a land of dreams.”

  “But…but that’s not enough! There will be so much suffering and death that I cannot stop! Suffering and death that is entirely needless, that will happen only because people are weak, evil, and stupid!”

  “That, alas, is very much the case,” said her mother. “If we could refashion the world and ourselves by snapping our fingers, I would have done it long ago, but we cannot. Ridding even our own minds of evil and stupidity is a monumental task, and helping others to do so as well is even greater. And rushing them faster than they can move on their own often leads to ill consequences. Sometimes we must bow to necessity, accept our limits, and do only what we can.”

  “That sounds like the kind of excuses and weak-headed nonsense you always warned me to avoid,” said Dasha.

  “It does, doesn’t it? And perhaps it is. One can always come up with a whole host of excellent reasons to fail, or do less than is necessary. But for me, my dear, it has been true. Sometimes you cannot fly all the way to the mountains or the sea simply by opening your mind, my love. Sometimes you have to make the journey step by painful step, even though the innocents who depend on you are suffering and dying at the other end. Sometimes you can only save the ones you can save. But that is still more than what would have been done if you had just lain down and refused to take even a single step towards your destination.”

  “So how can I bear the pain?” asked Dasha tremulously. “How can I keep from collapsing under its burden?”

  “Ah, my love! If only I had a good answer to your question! But again, all I can tell you is what has helped me. And what has helped me more often than not is to pretend that I’m not there, not where the pain is, or that the pain is not where I am. It took me many long years to learn this skill, my dear, and even now I am a very poor practitioner of it, but it does help. At first I thought of myself as encased in ice, or under water, and the pain and the misery were somewhere on the other side of it. Now I just…leave my body and my agony. I can still see and hear and even speak, but I am outside of myself, somehow. Perhaps it is the beginning of what our foremothers who had farsight could do; I don’t know, but in any case it helps.”

  “I see.” Dasha was starting to feel calmer. “I suppose I can try it.”

  “Try it, my love, try it. It will do you no harm, and may help. And pray. Perhaps the gods will hear you.”

  “The gods are even crueler than the world of women, though!”

  “So we say, my dear, and so it sometimes seems to us…but I have my doubts. When I was truly in need, the gods answered my calls, even if they would claim that they didn’t. They are certainly not kind and benevolent as a rule, but sometimes they do help, when you are very desperate. So try it.”

  “Very well,” said Dasha.

  Her mother put her arms around her. “I wish you did not have to go through…all this,” she said. “Everything that I have suffered myself. But I think it is necessary. It is the price for wisdom, it is the price for the changes we wish to make and for making the world better than it was before. There is always a price, my dear, but remember: you can demand a price too. In fact, you do whether you will it or no. You must pass the trial and pay the price to achieve anything worth achieving in this life, my love, no matter how much others may wish to shield you from it. But I promise you that I will stand with you and behind you every step of the way. I will do all I can not to let you down the way my own mother did, and I will keep your oath with you.”

  “I just…I know it sounds silly, but sometimes…sometimes the thing that irritates me the most, that makes it the hardest, is when people think I’m being foolish or silly. And then I start to worry that I am being foolish or silly.”

  “There’s nothing wrong w
ith being foolish and silly,” her mother said. “Or hardheaded, or hot-tempered, or any of those other things that people don’t like. When I look back at myself when I was your age, all the things that other people found so irritating about me, and tried to argue me out of or cure me of—all those flaws, those faults, those were the foundations of what are now—I say humbly—my greatest virtues. Even the things that I now look back on with embarrassment and shame, and wish I could undo or take back. Especially the things I’m ashamed of and wish I could take back. Those were probably the most important things of all. And it will be the same for you, I have no doubt.”

  Dasha must have made a doubtful face, for her mother laughed and said, “I know it may not seem very comforting now. But someday many years from now it might. And having other people think that you’re foolish and silly—that’s just part of being a ruler, being Tsarina. Because being Tsarina means making the hard decisions, the ones that no one else wants to make. And people think that that means saying ‘We’ll do this because we have to in order to win right now,’ but sometimes it means just the opposite. Sometimes it means saying ‘We won’t do this, even though we can, because we mustn’t, even if it means we could win right now.’ Sometimes it means saying that some things are too terrible, that some costs are too high, even if people think they are willing to pay them. And those are perhaps the hardest decisions of all, and the ones that take the most courage.”

  “I don’t know if I have enough courage,” Dasha said, her voice wobbling. “I thought sometimes—I made it through so many things on the journey, and sometimes I thought I really was brave, I really was strong, but then I would feel my heart fail me again, and looking back on it, I don’t know how I made it through so many of the things I did. I don’t know how I did, and I don’t think I could do it again. I was constantly on the edge of failure, and it was only…it was only some kind of magic, some kind of madness, that got me through!”

  “That’s how we get through things, my dove,” her mother told her. “If it’s something really worth getting through, then it’s something we don’t know how we’ll make it through, how we’ll survive it.” She patted Dasha’s back. “No doubt you have many more things to tell me,” she said. “But perhaps we can while away the long ride home by talking about them. We don’t want to keep the others waiting too long, or they’ll start to worry and cause trouble. Oh! And speaking of others—your friend Fedya is here, along with half his sanctuary, as far as I can tell.”

  “Oh,” said Dasha. “Fedya.”

  “Is he not your friend, then? The brothers told me you had taken him in on the road, and the two of you were fast friends.”

  “It’s not that, it’s just that…when we met him, he was lost and in trouble and we tried to help him, but…all he thought about was himself! All he thought about was how we could help him, not how he could help us! I know that he was unhappy, that he needed help, but even so…Svetochka said that that proved he was no woman, that only a man would behave that way, but I…I don’t want to believe it, but it seemed so true! It was all so silly and foolish, and he was so selfish, even though sometimes he was right, he could see and say things that no one else could, just like me, but he was still silly and selfish, and all the time he needed my help! And nothing I could say or do seemed to help him, because…because he was so selfish!”

  “The people who most need help are often the ones least able to accept it,” her mother told her. “Those who are selfish are often the least able to take in what they are so desperately trying to grasp. And…it does seem to be a disease that particularly affects men, that is true.” She sighed. “I wish I could help you by helping them cure themselves, my love, but progress on that front is very slow, very slow indeed.”

  “But it’s so stupid!” Dasha cried. “All you have to do not to be selfish is…not be selfish! And…and…if everyone acted like Fedya, or like all the others—the whole world would collapse! They can only get away with acting like that because the rest of us are keeping them from falling flat on their faces!”

  Her mother sighed again. “I’m afraid you are right, my love. You know…people always used to tell me that I needed to take in a bit of a man. And what they meant was, well…you understand. They were just being…they were just being crude and cruel. But in a way they were right. I did need to become a bit more like a man, I did need to learn how to think of myself sometimes, because otherwise I could do nothing. I was suffering from a kind of unselfishness that went…it went right out the other side of unselfishness and back to selfishness again. So I cannot speak too harshly about the selfishness of others. But…you are right. The Fedyas of the world can only survive because most of us are not them. The selfish of the world live off the backs of the unselfish. If we were to all ‘act like men,’ then, well, I don’t know if the world would collapse, because the world is so much more than us mere mortals, but our world would collapse, most certainly.”

  “So what can we do?” demanded Dasha. “We can’t just…we can’t just let ourselves be used by the selfish people of the world! We can’t let them run things! We can’t even let them think that they run things!”

  “No, my dove,” her mother agreed. “Certainly not. And yet you are right, it is a constant struggle. All I can say is…all I can say is that what I have learned, what has held true for me, is that to be unselfish, to truly put others first, is the greatest power there is, at least in the world of women. To be able to put yourself in the shoes of others, to be able to stand up for others, to be able think beyond your own petty concerns and take on the concerns of others—well, some might call it weakness, and for some it is weakness, but for the strong it is strength. The only real strength there is. Because we are all weak. We are born weak and we will die weak, and if we have a little strength in between—well, that is only a passing thing. But ‘we,’ when ‘we’ is not ‘I’ but ‘us,’ well, we are strong. But in order for that to work, we have to share that strength, for otherwise it will evaporate like frost in spring.” She patted Dasha’s arm. “Come,” she said. “The others must be waiting for us. And we can’t leave them to their own devices for too long, or the gods alone know what they’ll get up to.”

  Dasha smiled wanly. “Surely they can go for a little while without our hovering,” she said.

  “Oh?” Her mother raised a brow at her. “You think so?”

  “Well…no. But they’re not completely incompetent. Vladya, at least…well, actually.”

  Her mother sighed. “What has Vladya gotten herself up to recently?” she asked.

  Dasha looked at her in surprise. “I always thought you loved Vladya more than anyone, and thought she could do no wrong.”

  “I love Vladya more than life itself,” her mother told her. “But her capacity for doing wrong is enormous. Especially since she thinks so highly of her own competence.”

  “Not without reason,” said Dasha. “When you compare her to the rest of her family…”

  “That is a very low bar,” said her mother. “I love Olga like a sister, and for making a hard journey across country there’s no one I’d rather have at my side, but she was never made for rule, and Vasilisa Vasilisovna even less so. Vladya could be a great woman, but she will have to give up her belief in her own greatness first. By the way, were those her guards accompanying you? Why did she bring so many?”

  “She’s raising an army,” Dasha said.

  Her mother raised her other brow. “Is she, now,” she said. “Her and Princess Belova. I can’t say I blame her, although I wish she would have consulted me first. I can’t have armies running around Zem’ willy-nilly, which is why I had my black earth princesses call up their men for a single army belonging to Krasnograd.”

  “She doesn’t think Krasnograd cares, or is able to do anything,” Dasha said. “Severnolesnoye has been hit hard by the raiders.”

  Her mother’s face changed. “She could have told me,” she said.

  “I don’t think she has a lot
of faith in Krasnograd,” Dasha said. “I don’t think she has a lot of faith in us.”

  “I suppose not,” said her mother. “Well, that must be dealt with too. Come. We can’t stand around here hiding from our troubles all evening, no matter how much we might like to. Time to see what complaints our troublemakers have prepared for us.” She turned and looked out onto the sea. Dasha looked too. A ray of light glanced off the surface of the water and struck her eyes. Once that ray of light had been something else, she thought. Once perhaps it had been someone like her. Or Miroslava Praskovyevna. Perhaps this light was her foremothers, reaching out to her in the only way they could, telling her that one day she too would become light just like them, join with them. And with everyone else she had lost, along with all the futures that had been taken from her. When she thought about it like that, all the loss wasn’t so bad.

  “Come,” she said, putting her arm through her mother’s. “Let’s go.”

  Chapter Thirty-Seven

  Boleslav Vlasiyevich and Oleg met them as soon as they came back around the kremlin and in sight of the others, followed shortly by Alik, Mitya, Seva, and several more guards, and Dasha realized that guards had been posted all around them. She had gotten so used to living comparatively freely on the road that the presence of so many guards felt oppressive, but she couldn’t really object. Boleslav Vlasiyevich and Oleg both smiled separately when they caught sight of her, and then gave each other funny, almost rueful, looks.

  A tall woman with long silver-black hair wound around under a high silver headdress, and large slanting eyes that looked something like Dasha’s mother’s, even though they were dark, not gray, came up and bowed and introduced herself as Marina Sofiyevna, Princess Pristanogradskaya.