by Kim Wilkins
Bolotnik was grinning at him. In the flickering light, the grin looked malevolent. Yet the conversation was as ordinary as any fishing-trip conversation. “Have you poked her, then?”
Daniel suppressed a laugh. “None of your business.”
Bolotnik shrugged, returning his attention to his net. “Of course you’ve poked her,” he muttered. “It’s only me has to poke a headless sow who never stops nagging.”
Daniel let the quiet resume for a while. The pile of fish beside them grew higher.
“How do we return your boat to you when we’re finished with it?” Daniel asked.
“It will return itself. Just leave it in the water with the oars drawn inside.” He grinned again. “Make sure it doesn’t return with you in it. By then, our bargain will no longer be current, and I’ll take you to my wife so she can eat you.”
“You mean ‘meet you’?”
“You heard me right.”
Dawn glimmered in the east. “Time to load up the boat,” he said to Bolotnik.
“One last warning,” he said. “Beware the russalki. They haunt the river for miles. Don’t let them find out your name, because they’ll use it and they’re irresistible. More beautiful than any Mir girl.” Bolotnik indicated Em with a nod. “She’ll be safe. It’s young men they want.”
“Okay,” Daniel said, “I’ll be careful.”
With the daylight they loaded up the long, shallow rowboat. Bolotnik arranged a circle of flat stones carefully on the bottom of the wooden boat, and rubbed his hands over it to start a fire.
“It won’t burn the wood, and it won’t go out,” he said. “It’s the same fire I use down under the water, river-flame.”
Em climbed into the boat, shrinking into her fur against the morning cold. Daniel threw in a dozen fish gathered on a hook, and Bolotnik pushed them off. Daniel picked up the oars and they began to move. The bump of oars and water echoed between the banks. Searing beams of dawn shot through the trees around the next bend, refracting purple and orange on the river.
“Thank you for your help,” he called to Bolotnik.
The gruff vodyanoy was already turning away, a hairy black figure growing distant on the bank, as Em and Daniel set off downriver to the next uncertain bend of their journey.
EIGHTEEN
The little boat was cramped and uncomfortable, but they were sun-warm and well-fed as they passed their first morning on the river. By the afternoon, though, a new discomfort had settled in for Em. She held off saying anything as long as she could, but finally told her travelling companion.
“Daniel,” she said, “I need to pee.”
Daniel pulled the oars in and they clattered against the wood panels of the boat, splashing Em’s ankles. “Go over the side. I can look the other way.”
“No. We’ll have to pull into the bank.”
“But—”
“I’m not worried about appearing inelegant, Daniel. I can’t stand up and aim like you. I’m worried about falling in, or capsizing the boat.”
Daniel turned to look over his shoulder in the direction they were travelling. “I can see a shallow incline a couple of hundred feet ahead. Can you hold on?”
“Yes. I’m not six.”
Daniel dipped the oars again and rowed vigorously. Em stretched her legs out on either side of the stockpile of fish which lay beside the magic fire. A low yellow flame licked over the stones, never quite high enough to warm the chill from her bones. The boat itself was mouldy and narrow, and she was having trouble getting comfortable among the hard surfaces and confined spaces. Daniel, with his long legs, was probably finding it infinitely worse. They cruised with the current over dark silvery water, accompanied by dank smells and fish smells, and the odd sharp smell of smoke from the magic fire: a cross between peat and sulphur. The banks of the river rose high and fell low, fir and larch grew densely, the occasional stand of willows dragging their long, sad arms into the water. Hordes of mosquitoes clouded around them, landing black and stinging on her wrists and knuckles.
Daniel lifted one oar and manoeuvred the boat to shore. It thumped softly against the bank, and Daniel hooked his arm around an overhanging branch to pull it in tight.
“Can you get out here?” he asked.
“Should be fine.” She stood, felt the boat tilt, steadied herself, then pulled herself out using the branch. Her feet landed safely on the ground.
“I won’t be long,” she said.
Daniel was tying a rope to the branch. “Take your time.”
Em picked her way across marshy ground, trampling tiny coloured flowers on weedy stems and flicking bugs off her neck. The trees ahead looked to provide some privacy, and she chose a suitable one to relieve herself behind. She glanced about as she did, and caught sight of an old fishing net caught over a low branch about twenty feet away. She re-dressed and moved towards it. One thing Bolotnik hadn’t given them was a means of catching their own fish. This one looked half-rotted and tangled, but it might come in handy. As she approached, she noticed that an old wooden bucket was turned up on the ground next to it. It was broken, mouldy and had no handle, but would make a fantastic on-board toilet so they didn’t have to keep getting in and out of the boat. She had already reached for it before her brain engaged and it occurred to her that it was highly suspicious that these objects were here. The thought was too late. The fine thread attached to the base of the bucket glinted; the net descended and thumped down onto her body.
“Damn,” she muttered, angry at herself, trying to shrug the net off. She was tangled in it somehow. There was no way of knowing if the trap had been laid years in the past or just that morning. “Daniel,” she called out, “I need you.”
“I’m coming,” he replied, and she heard footsteps but couldn’t be sure they were his. She pulled the net off one arm, found it snarled over her shoulder, and tried again. As she touched it, she felt a slither of movement between her fingers. This was no ordinary net. What she had mistaken for an old, mouldy, impossibly tangled fishing net now proved itself to be a sophisticated trap. Knots touched other knots and formed new junctions with a sticky sucking noise. The harder she tried to loosen herself, the tighter she became ensnared. The warmth of her skin made the rope liquefy and resolve, her struggles made it slither and twist.
“Daniel, quick!” she called, hoping that imbuing her voice with an edge of panic would make him come faster.
He appeared around the trunk of a fir tree. His face grew alarmed as he saw her struggling with the trap, and his alarm frightened her. He raced towards her, reaching out his fingers.
“No, don’t touch it,” she said forcefully. “You’d just get caught in it too. It seems to like the warmth of human skin. Find a stick, see if you can lift it off with that. Preferably before whoever made it comes back for it.”
Daniel searched on the ground and seized on a thick stick, which he poked towards the net. “This is very old,” he said, relaxing a little. “The bucket too. It’s probably been here for years.”
“Do you think so?”
“Yes, certainly. The bucket probably once held fish. I remember making a trap like this for a bird when I was fifteen.” He gently poked the stick under the net over her shoulders and lifted. “Raise your arms,” he said. “We’ll have to try to get it off carefully.”
She raised her arms slowly, as Daniel inched the net up higher and higher. He released her left arm, then her right. The net now hung over her head and face.
“It’s tangled in my hair,” she said.
“We’ll get it off your face first,” he replied, the stick coming dangerously close to poking her eyes out. “Can you close your eyes?”
She did as he asked, not quite trusting him with the stick. A bird cried out an alarm deep in the forest and Em felt keenly that they should be moving away from here. The net began to peel off her face, the stick grazed her brow.
“Sorry,” Daniel said.
“It’s okay. I think we should hurry.”
“Lean over.”
She leaned to the side, opening her eyes. The net hung heavy in her hair, and Daniel pushed it off. It landed with a soft whump in the undergrowth. A puff of decayed leaf matter rose. Em crouched to take the bucket, breaking the thread which attached it to the net. “Nice work, Daniel,” she said. “I thought I might be wearing that all the way home.”
“It would have matched the black lipstick nicely,” he said.
Em wiped the back of her hand against her mouth. She had forgotten the stain Bolotnik’s lips had left on hers. “Is it fading?” she asked.
Daniel peered closer. “Doesn’t seem to be. Maybe a little.”
She held the bucket up, triumphant. “Toilet,” she said. “An unpleasant, mouldy, fish-scented one.”
“I’ve used worse in London.”
Em relished the relative safety of the boat as they headed back towards the riverbank. At least out on the river they could see where they were going and what was coming for them. She was brushing a mosquito from her neck when Daniel seized her upper arm and pulled her behind a tree.
“What?”
“Shh,” he said sharply, indicating with a nod towards their boat.
About two feet in front of it was a strange crouching figure. It took Em a few moments to make sense of it. Thickset, large-bosomed, fat doughy arms, no head. She moved closer to the boat, crouching lower.
“It’s Bolotnik’s wife,” she said. “It has to be.”
“What’s she doing?”
“If I didn’t know better I’d say she’s sniffing the boat.”
“Without a nose?”
Em tried to get a better view of her. Where her head should have been, the neck was grown over with the same doughy pale skin. A few straggling hairs grew there, around a saggy flap of skin which may have masked an opening. “What are we going to do?”
“Wait and see. She might leave it and wander off.”
“She must know it’s her husband’s boat. What if she takes it with her?”
Bolotnik’s wife turned sharply then, as though she’d heard them.
“Okay, if she can hear and smell, she can also see,” Em whispered, pressing her mouth close to Daniel’s ear. “We can’t let her find us, especially as she’ll be able to tell with one look at me that I’ve been kissing her husband.”
Daniel exhaled softly, knocking his head gently on the trunk. “I am so sick of this,” he said. “I feel I’m going to lose my mind if I have to keep living with this fear.”
She touched his wrist. “We’ve survived this far,” she said, trying to sound reassuring.
“Through luck and gold. Both will run out eventually.”
Em inclined her head in the direction of the river. “What’s she doing?”
Daniel carefully bent around the tree. An instant later he was on his feet, pulling Em up too. “She saw me, she’s coming,” he said and started to run.
Em took to her heels after Daniel, then caught up to him and pulled him behind a tree.
“Stop!” she hissed.
“What?”
Em dropped her voice as low as she could. “We can’t keep running. We need the boat.”
Daniel shook his head, his shoulders lifting: what can we do?
“The net.”
Daniel turned his face to her and nodded. Up this close, Em could see he was pale and shaking. Would he never grow used to the constant cycle of panic and action? A hundred years ago, men his age were dodging bullets on battlefields. Had they been unable to manage their fear too? Was Daniel’s generation too softened by progress for reckless heroics?
“It’s okay,” she whispered. With a gentle incline of her head, she signalled that they should inch their way back to the glade where they had left the net.
Quietly, miming instructions to the other, Em and Daniel each found a sturdy stick to pick up the net. Em’s was a young branch, broken by the wind perhaps, about three feet long and three inches across. Daniel’s was slightly larger. They each caught an end of the net and held it up, walking apart to spread it wide. Then, with a nod from Daniel to tell her he was ready, Em called out, “We’re over here!”
Footsteps thundered towards them. Em peered out from behind a tree. The headless woman uttered a bellow, which sent the flap on her headless neck fluttering open so the sound could spit through the blowhole. “Mir woman,” she said. “I’ve smelled you and heard you, and now I see you!”
“Come and get me then,” Em called.
“Have you been kissing my husband?”
“Yes.” Em braced herself as the distance between them closed. She could see fine yellow spines lining the woman’s arms, like the needles on a poisonous fish. Her body was large and powerfully built, and her lack of a head was very little handicap. “Yes, I kissed him, and I’d do it again.”
Bolotnik’s wife doubled her speed, leaking enraged gasps. Daniel, standing parallel to Em, was poised to move on her signal. The woman drew closer, Em took a deep breath, signalled to Daniel he should move.
He stepped out, stretching the net across the woman’s path. She skidded, but the muddy ground prevented her from slowing in time. She landed with a whump in the net, cursing and gasping.
Daniel and Em leapt out, wrapping the net tightly around her.
“Let me go, foul Mir folk! I’ll kill you, my husband will eat you.”
“Quick, Em, let’s get out of here.”
Taking a deep breath, Bolotnik’s wife puffed up, and the yellow spines on her arms became erect and sharp. One sliced through Em’s sleeve and into her wrist, leaving a hot trail of pain. They also sliced at the net, sawing into the rope. She relaxed and breathed in again, puffing up and cutting at the net.
“She’s going to get free!” Em called.
“We should run.”
“She’s quick, she’ll follow us.” Em had already loosened her stick from the net, and took a swing at Bolotnik’s wife. Without a head to aim for, her blow landed in the woman’s back. She gasped, fell to her knees, her cutting spines withdrawing.
“Em, we should run.”
“She’ll just follow us,” Em said. “I’m sick of running away.” Another blow. The enraged woman was taking another breath to puff out her spines, but Em knocked the wind out of her. A groan came out of the blowhole, followed by a seeping yellow substance. Em’s stick splintered in half and she tossed it into the undergrowth. She reached for a large rock to wield instead.
Daniel hefted his stick and took aim as well. Em had the white-hot sensation that matters had swung entirely out of control, as they hammered the woman’s body but she refused to fall, refused to stop puffing her spines. The net was shredding apart, as Em and Daniel rained blow after sickening blow on Bolotnik’s wife, and blood and yellow discharge stained the ropes and the ground beneath them. An oily, fishy smell pervaded the air.
Finally, finally, the headless body slipped to the ground. Em thumped her again and again, until Daniel caught her wrist in his hand and shouted, “Em, stop!”
Em looked up at him, dazed. “Why are you shouting at me?”
“I said it four times, you didn’t hear me. She’s dead.”
“Dead?” Em stared at the crumpled, beaten body, genuinely surprised. She tried to catch her breath. “Dead?”
“What did you think would happen?” he said, throwing his stick away in disgust.
Em leaned against a tree trunk, dropping her rock. “Oh.”
“Back to the boat,” he said. “Before Bolotnik comes and finds us.”
They left the ruined body of Bolotnik’s wife and the shreds of the sticky net in the stinking undergrowth and ran back down to the boat. Em seized her bucket, the consolation prize in this horrific adventure, and threw it into the boat ahead of her. Daniel untied the rope and pushed off with the oars. They were still catching their breath five minutes later, still unable to speak.
Finally, Daniel said, “I feel sick.”
Em closed her eyes tight then opened them aga
in. “I can still smell that oily yellow goo. Was that her blood?”
“She had blood too. It was something else. It was—oh god, Em. Look at your arm.”
Em looked down. Her wrist, where the spine had cut into her, was oozing the same yellowish fluid. She leaned over the side of the boat and let it drag through the water. “She got me,” she said.
“What if it’s poison?”
Em pulled her arm out of the water and pushed her sleeve up to examine the wound more closely. The cut was shallow, but wide, and the yellow substance was mingled with her own blood in the wound. She tore a strip off the bottom of her pants and dabbed at it gingerly. The yellow seeped onto the cloth. She squeezed the wound gently, wincing from the pain. Squiggles of yellow fled from her touch, sinking into her blood until they became invisible. “There’s not much,” she said. “I don’t feel ill. It’s probably not poison.” She glanced up and saw very clearly on Daniel’s face how much he would hate to lose her now. Not because of any special fondness, simply for fear of being alone.
Daniel pulled the oars in and leaned forward on his knees, his hands over his face. Em tried to ignore this display of emotion, dabbing at the wound and examining how her body felt. Was that strange sick feeling a result of poison in a wound? Or was it a result of having beaten a woman to death? Daniel breathed in his sobs, and eventually raised his head, looking off into the middle distance as though distracted. This attempt to appear as though he hadn’t been crying touched her far more than his tears, and she said, “Daniel, please take some small comfort. We are still alive. We still have the bear. This may yet work out.”
“Em, I don’t think it will. I think we’re probably going to die.”
She watched him, wordlessly.
“Em? Did you hear what I said?”
“I’ve known that since we arrived,” she said.
He shook his head, that now-familiar expression of puzzlement on his face. “But you said—”
“I said all kinds of things, Daniel, because your fear was a liability. It still is. But you’re right. We’re probably going to die.”
