by Kim Wilkins
She glanced over her shoulder, and saw that the blonde russalka had taken Daniel to the water’s edge. He was glassy-eyed and cadaverous, barely able to move his own limbs, as though the person he had been was buried under flesh and bone. She wanted to turn her gaze away, not see him so naked and depleted. But the russalka was pointing at the water and asking something. Em couldn’t make out the words, but thought she might have said, “What is it?”
There was a long pause; Daniel looked confused. He mumbled something.
The russalka whispered in his ear. He drew his brows down, concentrating, then said, “A bear.”
Em drew a little gasp. The bear was in the rock pool. Her plans would have to involve recovering it as well as Daniel.
The russalka was asking Daniel more questions, but he had closed his eyes, and the other girls gathered around him and laid him down on the bank. They hovered over him, pressing their bodies and mouths against him, and Em turned away. To see him naked was one thing, to watch him take part in group sex was quite another.
She yawned. Soon the russalki would tire and then sleep, but she couldn’t. If she and Daniel were oblivious at the same time, they could wake up somewhere far worse, perhaps leaving the bear in the possession of the russalki. She watched the movement of the branches in the evening breeze. There was no point in her building a fire: she had nothing to cook and no use for heat. So instead she hugged her knees and ran over her plans in her head.
There was a long period of quiet, and Em watched the encampment with eager interest. Daniel slept; two of the russalki slept. But the third, the blonde one whom Em had come to regard as the leader, sat up and gazed at Daniel. It was difficult to see her features clearly in the dark and at such a distance, but Em was fairly certain the girl was in love with Daniel. Her gaze never left him, her breasts rose and fell in melodramatic sighs, her hands went over and over to his ribs and chest, forlorn thumbs extending childlike into the hollows of his throat and armpits. Daniel would stir, she would kiss him and he would sleep again.
The night was very long. Em had suffered through hunger and she had suffered through cold, and learned that the body could endure them well enough with an act of will. But tiredness…Sleep was insistently pressing on her brain. Put your head down, close your eyes, give up consciousness.
She paced. She leaned upright against a tree. She did star-jumps. She recited poems under her breath. She thought up complicated sentences and translated them into as many languages as she could. Still the blonde russalka stayed awake. Em was starting to think she might have to go down there and drag Daniel off, taking her chances with his new lover.
But then Daniel woke and with his awakening all the other russalki woke too. They purred and fondled and probed him, and she kicked a rock and muttered, “Shit, shit,” and looked away.
The night had grown still, and their voices rose up to her on the ridge. The girls made tiny gasps of giggled pleasure, but Daniel sounded like an animal: incoherent grunts and moans, as though he no longer possessed any consciousness of his dignity or humanity. It made her think that perhaps Daniel was already lost, that he wouldn’t be returning from this adventure. In that case, it made sense for her to get the bear first and worry about Daniel later.
The orgy went on and on, and Em sat with her head in her hands trying not to listen. She sneaked one curious peek, but was rewarded only with the sight of flailing limbs and cascading hair. It had been a long time since she had thought about sex. Not because she didn’t enjoy it: she was as much attracted to bodily pleasure as anyone. Rather, sexual relationships rose out of other relationships, the kind of relationships that she couldn’t form. The problem of what to do with erotic urges had plagued her for many years. Was she to make love to a piece of machinery, or pay a handsome stranger? Neither option had felt like her style, so she had simply willed herself to be dead to those urges. Any glimmer of physical desire was greeted with a quick and certain mental blockage, the way thieves are met with steel security screens in banks.
Behind her, the quiet settled again. She turned. Daniel lay spent on the grass, two russalki curled around him stroking his hair. The blonde one sat and watched them, idly dangling her foot in the pool.
Em decided that the instant the other two were asleep, she would take her chances with their leader and steal the bear. As for Daniel…she could decide what to do about him later.
She stood, collecting her tools and readying herself. She left Daniel’s clothes safely on dry land, and backed down the ridge and out to the edge of the river.
By the time she got there, some commotion had started. Voices were raised, Daniel’s among them. She thought she heard him call Rosa’s name, and then there were the sounds of struggle and a splash. Em hesitated only half an instant, not sure whether to go back up to the ridge to see what was happening, or to dive in as planned.
Dive. The cold hiss again, and she realised Morozko was still close in her thoughts.
She plunged into the water.
It was dark and freezing, but she didn’t fear the cold. She swam fast, stopped to see ahead of her, and swam again. Daniel was not on the bank. The blonde russalka was pulling herself out of the river. Adrenalin lit a fire in Em’s muscles, and she propelled herself through the water. Ahead, a thrashing limb, sinking.
Two seconds later she had him. There was shouting up on land. She hooked her arm around Daniel’s throat and swam away with him.
“Daniel!”
“Daniel!”
Daniel, unconscious but operating on dull instinct, struggled weakly against her. He slipped under water. She picked him up under the arms again, swam against the current. She glanced over her shoulder at the russalki, thought she saw three hags instead of three beautiful temptresses. Took a deep breath and plunged herself and Daniel under the water, away from their cries.
Seconds later they surfaced.
Daniel had inhaled water, his lips were white. She dragged him up onto the bank and laid him on his stomach, sitting on his back. She quickly filled his ears with mud as the russalki’s cries continued. She pressed down, crushing her knees into his ribs. Water spurted out of his nose and mouth.
She flipped him over. Airways clear. Not breathing. Pressing her mouth over his, she pushed air into his lungs.
Nothing.
More air.
Nothing.
More air.
He coughed. More water trickled from his mouth. His lungs began to work on their own. Em pressed her head to his chest. His heartbeat was surprisingly slow and rhythmic.
But he was not conscious.
She slapped his face gently, pinched him. But when she peeled back his eyelids, only the whites of his eyes were showing.
Daniel was alive, but dead to the world.
Em picked him up and dragged him further into the woods. The cold air had brought his skin into goosebumps. She returned to the ridge for his clothes. From here, she could see the three russalki, sitting on their rock and sobbing into their hands. The blonde one, in particular, was wailing and calling Daniel’s name. Em went back to Daniel and dressed him, bringing her breathing under control.
The russalki weren’t hunters. As long as Daniel couldn’t hear their cries, he was safe. She settled him under his almost-dry fur and built a fire. Daniel’s lighter was low on lighter fluid; she had to flick it two or three times to get a tiny flame which wouldn’t catch on the pile of leaves she had made. It was the last on a long list of difficulties, but Em found herself bubbling over with anger.
“Damn it!” she shouted and flung the lighter away from her. Ten seconds later she was crawling around in the undergrowth, trying to find it. With shaking hands, she touched the flame to the leaves again; this time it caught.
When the fire was crackling low, the sun had broken over the horizon. Em’s eyes were sore and gritty, and she left Daniel and made her way back down to the ridge. The russalki leaned on each other now, mournfully gazing out over the river. They would see her if s
he came to take the bear. Unless she stayed underwater. Could she hold her breath that long?
Em drove her fingernails into her palms. Weariness, heavy as six feet of soil, made her sag. It was all too hard. She was exhausted. But she had to have the bear. Birds sang their morning songs, fresh daylight glinted on dew. Em walked through the moist shadows to the edge of the river and took a deep, deep breath.
Then dived in.
Before a quarter of her journey had passed she was already dying to breathe. The water was dirty and sunless, the pool seemed a million miles away. She focused and stayed steady on her path. In the gloom, she could see fish darting, weed twisting slowly. A shaft of light broke the surface just ahead, letting her know she was moving towards the treeless bend where the russalki sat. Her lungs felt blocked and her throat felt hard. She could see the algae-covered rocks where they sloped underwater, and swam for them. She longed to surface, to take a huge gulp of air.
Then she saw it, sitting in a green-tinted beam of refracted sunlight. The bear. The light played over her golden surface and her open eyes met Em’s as she smiled smugly and waited to be collected.
Em’s fingers closed on the bear. A small triumph. She needed to breathe. She couldn’t continue another moment without air, or she would black out and her body would draw in two lungs full of water. She turned, tried to swim as far as she could before she surfaced. Her body, operating on instinct, arrowed up to the air.
She breathed.
“There’s the woman!”
“She has our treasure!”
The russalki had spotted her and were climbing to their feet. Again, they had transformed: the sweet, full breasts had turned into wizened sacs, the creamy complexions sagged with wrinkles. Em dashed for the bank, heard them splash into the water behind her. She beat them to shore, ran up into the woods to find Daniel, still unconscious, by the fire.
Fire. Water.
Em knew nothing about Russian folklore, but knew these elements were each other’s enemies. She cracked open Daniel’s lighter, poured the remaining lighter fluid onto the end of a big stick and touched it to the flames. She turned, the burning torch firmly in her right hand, the bear curled against her ribs with her left. The russalki skidded to a halt when they saw her. They were girls again, beautiful and wet-eyed, with sad trembling mouths.
“Oh, let us keep him.”
“We didn’t mean to hurt him.”
“Get back,” Em said. “Leave him alone. Leave me alone.” She warily crouched next to Daniel. “I’m taking him with me.”
The girls backed away, tears quivering on their lashes. The lighter fluid was burning off quickly, she only had a few moments to scare them away. In front of them, a fall of leaves. Hopefully they were dry enough to catch. She flung the torch into the pile of leaves, and the girls cringed back as flame leapt up in front of them.
“Go!” she said. “Go, or I’ll set you all alight.”
Shrieking, clutching each other, their skin drooping to wrinkles, they fled. None of them looked back.
The fire was moving, catching on more deadfall. So much the better. It would put a screen between Daniel and any of the russalki if they dared to return. The flames moved slowly, but she knew she had to get out quickly. She crouched next to Daniel, got his arm around her shoulder and stumbled forward, away from the fire, away from the river. She hoped to get him as far from the russalki as she could before she decided what to do next. But he was heavy, a dead weight, and she was weary.
She stopped every ten minutes and rested, then dragged him a little further. She tried lying him down in the crackling undergrowth and pulling him by his feet, and progressed quite a distance like that until she accidentally smacked his head against a protruding rock.
She dropped him, sat down to rest her exhausted body, and thought.
The woods were quiet, the trees wide spaced, allowing in the sunlight. Ahead of her was a ridge. Impossible to drag Daniel up there. She couldn’t head back to the river; she wasn’t heading north again towards the Dead Forest, and she didn’t want to go any further south, away from the Snow Witch.
She glanced at Daniel. His face was peaceful, his eyelids faintly purple, his pulse a soft flutter against his throat. He knew no pain, no hunger, no cold.
“I can’t leave you here,” she said, but already she was glancing around for a sheltered place. The bear seemed to be watching her, pleased with the new plan. About fifty feet away, a fallen log, collapsed on one side but with one intact curve: enough to keep off the rain if it fell, enough to hide Daniel from the greedy eyes of the forest demons.
Kneeling, she dragged him over and tucked him into the hollow. She collected twigs and leaves, took her time working to hide him properly, make him warm, hang his fur over the gap and remove him completely from sight. Then she bent to the ground and found handfuls of mud to smear over the bear. If nobody suspected she was made of gold, they would allow Em to keep her. It gave Em an odd shine of satisfaction to pack mud into the bear’s eyes and smiling mouth.
Finally, Em knelt next to the log and leaned forward, feeling she should say something but not sure what.
“I’ll make a deal with you, Daniel,” she whispered, pressing her cheek against the flaking wood. “I’ll walk until nightfall to see if I can find help, and then I’ll come back for you. If there is nobody to find, then I’ll just keep going and I’ll search for the Snow Witch alone.” She patted the log. “I’m sorry.”
Then she rose and walked towards the east.
TWENTY-TWO
Lack of sleep made the day nightmarishly long. Em forced her legs to keep moving, even though her brain was incapable of anything but dazed delayed reactions. She stumbled over rocks and walked into trees. As much as she tried to control them, her thoughts kept returning to the fallen log with Daniel packed safely inside. What if he woke from his enchantment? Would he come after her? Or wait for days for her return, more faithful than she by nature? Along the way, she had been arranging stones into piles—beacons to Daniel of where she had travelled—every three hundred feet or so.
The woods thinned, then plains unfolded, with only loose stands of trees dotted across them. Long yellow grass waved in the breeze, blazed under the sun. Grass seeds clung to her clothes and itched and insects darted around her. The ground was less stony, so she twisted the long grass stalks into knots, marking her path. From every ridge she scanned for civilisation; in every hollow she convinced herself she’d never see another living creature again.
She was worn out by late afternoon, but didn’t dare sit still for fear of falling asleep. Stopping to catch her breath, hands on her knees and weary head hanging forward, she thought about returning to Daniel, maybe even getting back on the river and following it towards the grassy fields they had seen, where they had been so positive they would be nearer the Snow Witch.
Keep moving east.
Again, the icy voice prickling in her mind.
So she kept moving, east if the sun setting directly behind her was any indication. Nightfall was less than an hour away, and Daniel was still helpless back there in his hollow.
Then, at last, she crested a rise and her nose twitched. Smoke. She could smell smoke.
She had found somebody. But who?
Renewed hope invigorated her muscles. She began to run.
After half an hour she returned to a walk. Then half an hour after that, a reluctant dragging of the feet. A little cottage had come into view under the thin glow of the moon: an unpainted wooden building, stained with centuries, the door black with mildew. Behind it, woodland. She had no idea what kind of creature lived here, and she had no gold to bargain with.
Well, perhaps that wasn’t entirely true.
Em circled the cottage. She passed a half-fallen stable with a skinny horse inside, and a shed full of old rubbish and a dilapidated cart. She moved a few feet into the woods, stopping to hide the muddy bear carefully under a bush. Then she dusted the dried mud off her hands and took a deep
breath, striding towards the front door of the cottage.
She rapped four times, hard.
“Who is it?” A weedy voice from within.
“A stranger. I need your help.”
“Go away.”
“I won’t hurt you, I—” Em leaned on the door and, realising it wasn’t closed, pushed it open. She took a step inside the single, dim room. Smoke filled the air, stinging her eyes as it rushed past her to escape out the door. The walls were streaked with soot. There was no light except for the open fire, and she could make out the silhouettes of three figures.
“I’m lost,” she said. “My friend is under an enchantment.”
The largest figure, a man of about fifty, stood up and turned to her. In the dark, she thought her vision deceived her.
But no, she really was seeing a face which was perfectly normal but for one defect: no eyes. Instead, little scarred hollows.
“You should leave,” he said with a scowl.
The woman—Em presumed this man’s wife—was bent to the fire, stirring a pot of meat stew. The greasy, gamey smell made Em’s mouth water. “Strangers aren’t welcome here.” Then she turned to Em with the same empty hollows in her face. The third person, a son of about teenage years, didn’t bother to turn. He rocked back and forth in his chair by the fire, saying nothing. Em took a hesitant step forward to check if he was scarred the same way as his parents. He was, but only on one side. His right eye was still intact.
“Don’t come any closer,” the man said.
“Please,” she said, spreading out her hands, then realised they couldn’t see the gesture. “I’m sorry to walk in on you like this, but I am desperate.” She scanned the dark room again. Apart from two straw mattresses and the chair their son sat in, it appeared they owned no furniture. A few pots and pans and tools were stacked in corners. The people themselves had no features which made them different from herself: no bark-like skin or fish eyes or green hair. “Are you human?” she asked.
