Rusalka

  But there was no virtue in thorn roots. He had never heard of any. It was something else Uulamets wanted…

  What shall I find? he turned to ask of Uulamets. What am I looking for?—But he was amazed into silence, seeing some movement from the tail of his eye. It was gone when he looked. There was only Uulamets and Pyetr standing in the moonlight, both looking toward him—

  And Pyetr’s sudden alarm telling him there was danger beside him—

  “Sasha!” Pyetr cried, and Sasha glanced aside, saw that movement in the tail of his eye again, some white thing floating in the air near Pyetr which vanished as he glanced back, Pyetr standing there with his hands up as if it were visible to him and Uulamets leaning on his staff with both hands, his lips moving and no sound coming out—

  Sasha hurled himself to his feet at the same moment he saw Pyetr slump bonelessly to the earth. He crossed that space at a run and felt something so cold, so dreadfully cold in the air he breathed, the air seeming dank and rotten.

  “Pyetr!” Sasha cried, and cast a look to Uulamets for help. The white thing darted back into the tail of his eye, a wisp that vanished as he glanced toward it. There was only Pyetr—then Pyetr surrounded by that drifting white thing the moment he cast an anguished glance aside to see where the wraith had gone. He realized then he could only see it that way—only from the tail of his eye; and it was not moving: it was hovering continually about Pyetr, whirling and hazing him about…

  “Stop it!” he pleaded, seizing Uulamets by the sleeve. “Stop it, do you see it? Help him!”

  “Help him?” Uulamets cried in outrage, and thumped his staff on the ground between his feet. “Damn him! He’s not the one!”

  The white thing was still there, flitting about Pyetr—and Pyetr began to follow it as if he could see it in front of him. Uulamets plunged after, dragging Sasha by the coat sleeve, bashing dead limbs aside with his staff, saying, “Do you see her, boy? Do you see her at all?”

  Sasha tried, turning his head, making himself victim to thorns and branches as they went. It was a ghost they were chasing… he was sure that it was.

  “Do you see her?”

  “Yes,” he stammered, breathless, willing to go, trying to see, and giving up that sidelong view for the undeniable sight of Pyetr, alone, traveling with swiftness Pyetr had never had on his own in the woods. “Pyetr!” he cried. “Stop!”

  But Uulamets shook him like a rat and hit him a dazing blow across the side of his head with the staff. “Let him follow!” Uulamets snarled. “Let him follow. Only say if you can see her!”

  He could see nothing in any direction for the moment, being blind with the blow to his head, but he swore that he could, he gasped a breath and another and swore to whatever the old man wanted, for fear of losing Pyetr in the woods if they stopped now—certain that there was no help for Pyetr or him either except Uulamets’ magic, and Uulamets’ good will, however he had to buy it.

  “I see her,” he lied, and lied again, when his eyes cleared and he could see Pyetr at least ahead of them, “She’s still there…”

  The old man hastened him grimly after, shoving him through branches that scored his face and hands, Uulamets panting and swearing as they went, until Sasha stumbled and lost his footing astride a downed log.

  And lost sight of Pyetr in the brush.

  “Pyetr!” he called out in fright. “Pyetr!”

  “Shut up!” the old man said, wrenching at his collar, and dragged him up.

  Pyetr was nowhere to be seen as he struggled to his feet with Uulamets’ fist holding his collar, as Uulamets pulled him along a slope of mouldering slick leaves. Sasha fell again, both of them sliding—

  Then he saw something pale lying at the bottom of the ravine, and scrambled down the slick incline toward it, the old man panting after him and cursing him, the both of them scrambling for balance on the slope of dead leaves.

  It was Pyetr, lying alone, Pyetr with his face so pale and his hands so cold—

  “Where is she?” Uulamets screamed. “Where Is she?”

  Sasha hauled Pyetr up in his arms and tried to find life in him, Pyetr’s hands falling lifeless and limp when he tried to warm them, his face wet and cold as if he had come from the river, although his clothes were dry. He had kept the cap somehow.

  Sasha took it off and called his name, slapping desperately at his face and finally shaking him. “Pyetr Illitch, wake up—”

  Uulamets shoved him aside, knelt down and laid his hand on Pyetr’s forehead. Sasha’s heart jumped then as if he had touched something burning hot; and there might have been pain, but he was not sure, because Pyetr had moved in the same moment. Pyetr’s eyes opened and Uulamets seized Pyetr by the throat and shook him, demanding, wildly, “Where did she go? Fool, where did she go?”

  Pyetr did not even struggle. Sasha flung his arms about him, turned his shoulder to get him away from Uulamets and cried, looking up and pointing up the ridge: “There!”

  Uulamets rose and stared in that direction, and Sasha hugged Pyetr up against him, feeling Pyetr trying to catch his breath.

  “Where?” Uulamets asked sharply, and the staff thumped down beside them.

  “She’s gone,” Sasha said, and shielded Pyetr’s head with his arm, expecting the old man would strike them.

  But Uulamets sank down onto a rotting log close beside them and let his staff fall against his shoulder. “ What did you see?” he asked wearily. “What did you see, boy?”

  “I’m not sure,” Sasha said. He was shaking from head to foot. He had to lie and he was never good at it. He held on to Pyetr as the only source of comfort in this place and had this most terrible imagination that whatever he had seen could be Pyetr at this moment, shape-shifted, ready to rend them both with claws and fangs. That was what travelers said could happen: Pyetr could be lost somewhere and he could be holding a leshy or worse in his arms.

  But Pyetr muttered something half-dazed and vulgar just then, and started shivering, too, which convinced him that it was most probably Pyetr he was holding. Pyetr looked about him of a sudden, tried to get up in his confusion, stumbled free of him and sat down hard, facing Uulamets.

  “My daughter prefers you,” Uulamets said in a harsh, hoarse voice. “I shouldn’t have been surprised.” Uulamets shoved the staff in their direction, striking Pyetr on the foot. “Where did she go?”

  “Your daughter,” Pyetr murmured, and shook his head and raked a hand through his hair. “Your daughter, old man—”

  “Where did she go?” Uulamets shouted. Pyetr drew his knees up into his arms and Sasha scrambled forward, thinking the old man might hit him, thus unprotected. But Pyetr drew a large breath and lifted a hand, pointing toward the woods ahead of him; and Uulamets got up and peered in that direction as if there was something to be seen but moonlight and dead trees.

  “Can you see her?” Sasha whispered, and Pyetr shook his head, shook it fiercely this time, and sat there until Uulamets walked back toward them.

  “We should go back to the house,” Uulamets said, which Sasha thought was a very good idea.

  “Yes, sir,” he said, and, taking Pyetr by the arm, pulled and helped him to his feet.

  Pyetr had nothing to say, not then nor on the trek home, except once to protest that he could walk on his own, although he was limping, and although he faltered at the rougher places and had frequently to catch his breath and his balance.

  “Help him,” Sasha begged of Uulamets, but Pyetr would have none of that either, shaking him off and continuing on until they were back at the dockside, and then by a steep climb up the hill, in the yard itself.

  Something went crashing off into the hedge. “Probably a rabbit,” Sasha said, because Pyetr had stopped still at the gate and seemed frozen there. He seized Pyetr by the arm and pulled him along in Uulamets’ track, himself afraid to look back or to wonder what might be watching from the hedge.

  Everything was real. He knew that it was and he knew that he was a part of it, and that Pye
tr was in the most terrible danger, because that creature, that white thing, was dead, and haunting the riverside, and Uulamets had said, speaking to Pyetr, My daughter prefers you…

  “Just a little further,” he said to Pyetr, for Pyetr’s strength finally seemed to give out on the walk-up, or the cold seemed to be too much for him.

  Then he felt the chill, too, and saw the white visitor from the tail of his eye.

  “Master Uulamets!” he said, holding fast to Pyetr.

  Uulamets turned quickly about.

  “It was here,” Sasha said. “It was here, following us—”

  “Inside,” Uulamets said from the porch, and pulled the latchstring in haste, bringing the door open, bringing a gold flood of firelight out onto them, to make shadows on the porch. “Inside. Quickly.”

  As if—Sasha thought—as if, daughter or no, the old man was in dire fear of what they had attracted.

  CHAPTER 9

  THERE WAS WARMTH, there were quilts to wrap in when they had shed the dew-damp coats, there was a cup of spirits, and Pyetr finally felt warm again.

  He felt foolish, too, and altogether put upon. He stood there in front of the fire sipping vodka while Uulamets went straight to his precious book, by oil light, and Sasha hovered between the fireside and the old man’s mutterings, scared and half-soaked from the ground as he was, and both of them like to take their deaths, Pyetr reckoned, from all this foolishness.

  “Here,” Pyetr said sullenly, offering the cap to Sasha, “have some. Warm up.”

  Sasha drank a little, made a face as he swallowed, and gave the cup back.

  Not a word out of him, not a word out of Uulamets. Only there was something shifting about uncomfortably under the house, like a bear or something that had decided to make a den of the cellar—only it was past that time of year that bears waked, by all he knew, and nothing made sense anyway.

  Sasha hovered between the fireside and the table, watching him, watching Uulamets. It annoyed him. He wished most of all that it were morning, when the sun would make sense out of the night made confused, and most of all he wished he would wake up from this bad dream. Probably, he thought, his memory was already confused, probably he had hit his head when he had fallen, and believed the boy’s addled nonsense, and imagined the girl who had wafted right through a thorn thicket, the solidity of which his right hand very bloodily attested.

  He took another sip. Uulamets turned another page and another, opened up an inkpot and wrote, with a black raven quill. Pyetr found himself shivering, his throat pricklish, his stomach upset.

  He thought about Uulamets at dinner, about the chance that Uulamets had slipped something into the stew or even—he swallowed a mouthful of vodka too suddenly, and it burned his raw throat all the way down—into the drink. That was too cruel.

  He thought, We have to get out of here, tomorrow, first thing, before he does us some violence—

  Uulamets rose from his place at the table, closed the inkpot and closed the book.

  Then Uulamets walked over to them at the hearth, frowning. “Did she,” Uulamets asked, “did she seem—unhappy? …”

  Pyetr shoved back his hair, lifted the cup, and glared at the old man. “Who seem unhappy? Your imaginations? Your conjurations from mushrooms and whatever you dropped into the tea?”

  “My daughter,” Uulamets shouted at him. “My daughter. Did she seem unhappy?”

  “She’s your daughter!” Pyetr cried, flinging off the quilt, ignoring Sasha’s reach for his arm. “Can’t you tell if she’s unhappy?” The whole question was ridiculous. He found himself answering and disgusted with himself, sat down in front of the fire with his vodka and tugged the quilt up about his shoulders. “She’s a damn mushroom. A taint in the tea. How should I know if she’s happy or not?”

  Except it seemed to him that the girl he had dreamed of had been lost and wrathful, and that she had tried to speak to him—a soundless speaking face all pale and beaded with water—

  “ Insolent hound!” Uulamets said and snatched the quilt away. “My daughter never had any sense about men. So she’s chosen you.“

  Pyetr stared up at him with the sinking realization that Sasha equally well consented in this insanity. Sasha was kneeling, tugging at his elbow, asking him to answer Uulamets—

  “His daughter,” Sasha whispered at his side. “He’s worried about her. She’s dead, Pyetr—”

  “Well, he has perfectly adequate cause to worry about her, then! This is all crazy, this is all absolutely crazy!” He contemplated his cup in desperation and feared indeed that it was drugged.

  “Tell him!”

  “She was soaking wet, was how she was,” Pyetr snapped, “and I doubt she was happier than I was.” His teeth started to chatter and he took a deep drink of the potion that was surely the cause of his visions—but there was no cure for them until dawn, he knew there was not, and he humored the boy, if not the old man. “She tried to talk. She went away—”

  “To which tree?” Uulamets demanded of him.

  “To which tree? It’s a damned forest out there, haven’t you noticed? To which damned tree? How should I know?” The grandmothers said that drowned girls haunted trees. Lured lovers to die. He had had to follow, in his dream. The dose of drugs had been too strong and he had fallen, and Uulamets wove lies, encouraging them by his questions to remember, as charlatans would, exactly what he intended they should remember. “I didn’t ask her about her tree, for the god’s sake. It didn’t occur to me.”

  Uulamets walked away in disgust. Sasha shook at his arm and whispered, “Pyetr, I think she’s a rusalka. And that’s a dangerous kind of ghost… she’s terribly dangerous, even to her own father. She could be responsible for the forest dying. Please. Don’t make jokes. Answer him. Tell him everything you saw.”

  “I didn’t see anything,” Pyetr said irritably. “He’s drugged the damned stew, is what he’s done. I told you watch him. Now we’re seeing drowned girls and there’s a bear under the house.” He took another drink, telling himself that if it was drugged, it had proved a dreamless sleep given enough quantity; and that was good enough tonight.

  “Pyetr. Did she say anything?”

  “I don’t want to talk about it.”

  “Let him be,” Uulamets said from across the room. “Let him drink himself into a stupor if that’s what he chooses. It’s not required he be sober.” Uulamets went back to his chair and his book.

  “Please,” Sasha said, “master Uulamets—”

  “Don’t be gullible,” Pyetr snapped.

  “No need of anything tonight,” Uulamets said, “except his existence here.”

  A man could justly feel indignant when the only company he had left sided with a man like Uulamets. Friend, indeed—boy, child, ward, charge: he had promoted ‘Mitri to friend, and most of ‘Mitri’s faults, he thought, outside Mitri’s outright villainy and the fact that he was increasingly tending to his father’s character—were the faults of a sometimes-man, sometimes-boy. He had his own faults, too, the god knew, among them that he had constantly to look for loyalty in someone younger than himself, because he did not, he admitted it to himself in his most morose broodings, seem to inspire it in more mature folk-Mature folk who had no sense of humor, damn them all, and who could not laugh, and who plodded about their work and their affairs and their petty concerns as if it was all too grim. Or there were villains, plenty of those, who laughed only at the folk they robbed. That was more than grim, and Pyetr had never wanted to be a villain. His father had been one, the god of thieves knew, and Pyetr did not miss him: he only aspired to pluck the fools a little and make them wiser, and play pranks on the ploddingly sober sort and wake them, and generally to amuse himself and find a handful of well-placed, lively friends and of course a lady or so to admire his wit. It seemed a modest ambition for a lively, easy-going fellow, in a world in which so few people cared to fill that role.

  But tonight he decided he must be out of step, he must have mistaken everything
, to end up here with no friend in the world, only a boy to take care of, one of the ox-sober ilk who was desperately determined to take the world seriously, and who somehow had taken him in hand and bartered and traded him to some lunatic self-named wizard, all for his own good, of course, never mind the wizard was poisoning them with drugs—the god only knew what had happened to his daughter…

  He was drunk. Or drugged. Probably the wizard boiled people up in his kettle when he got them to trusting him. Or fed them to whatever he kept in the cellar. Domovoi indeed. Rusalkas. House-things and Things in the yard and things going bump in the cellar under the boards he was sitting on.

  He dropped his head against his arm. He listened to the boy talking to Uulamets, who was telling him things about spells and incantations and how he knew that he could bring his daughter back if he could find the right tree.

  And the boy stood there and listened to all this.

  The boy who thought he was a wizard himself—listened to all this and answered questions like: How did she seem to you?

  Sasha said: Just a wispy thing. All white. Like a cloud. Couldn’t you see her, sir?

  And the old man said, after a moment: No.

  Then, the boy asked—how did you know where to look for her?

  Liquid gurgled into a cup. The old man said, I didn’t. But my daughter wouldn’t give up life so easily. Her mother—

  The cup banged onto the table.

  Her mother’s disposition and my ability, Uulamets said harshly. Go to bed, boy…

  The cup was in danger. Sasha lifted it carefully from Pyetr’s fingers and put it on the shelf, and Pyetr never twitched. The old man wanted his book, Pyetr was asleep, and that was just as well, Sasha reckoned: Pyetr just did not deal well with this kind of thing—no discredit to Pyetr: Sasha reckoned that, too, that being deaf and blind to certain things all one’s life and then being knocked down and trampled underfoot by one had to disturb a man like Pyetr, who, Sasha figured, might joke and clown about—but certainly, certainly when he had ridden so recklessly under The Cockerel’s signboard, and it looked as if it was all chance—Pyetr had known better than most folk ever did just precisely where the ground was.