Rusalka

  The alternative, of course, was to let go of common, workaday reason once for all, smile at Uulamets and say, I’m sorry, whatever you say has to be true—the way Sasha had; and since Sasha had decided to take Uulamets’ side of things, Pyetr found himself their only anchor to things outside this woods. Once he began to assent to Uulamets’ personal madness escape became very remote for them.

  He sat there all day listening to the boy tell Uulamets what precisely had happened on the river, listening to Sasha, damn it all, tell Uulamets about his investigating the dockside, if not the boat; and finally admitting that, too, in Uulamets’ persistent questioning. Pyetr stared at the rafters, ground his teeth, and asked the gods why he was saddled with a fool.

  But the answer to that, he told himself, was simply that Sasha had found in Uulamets what he had always wanted, a wizard to tell him his fancies were true and his wishes could change things in ways he wanted.

  “What about the horses?” he asked Sasha when Sasha came near the fire.

  “What horses?”

  “Or the tsar’s own carriage. Either one would do. Maybe our host could wish them up—you being only a novice.”

  “Pyetr, listen to him. Please listen to him.”

  He gave a flourish of his hand. “Of course. All day. Constantly. Inner eyes and all that. God, boy. I did think you had more sense.”

  “Pyetr—”

  “He wants to find a damned tree. Fine. Let’s go out in the woods and I’ll find him a nice one. And while we’re stumbling about in the dark, supposing we don’t fall in a bog, he’s going to sing his daughter up out of the grave. That should be a sight. I’ll pass on the stew tonight. I’ll make my own dinner.”

  Sasha looked hurt. “I never was careless. Master Uulamets—”

  “Master Uulamets, is it?”

  “He’s telling us the truth. I swear to you. She’s why there aren’t any animals. It was my luck got us as far through these woods as it did. It got us to him.”

  “Bravo. So we can be ghost bait.”

  “If we can find her tree or if he can put a spell on her—we’re safe. We won’t be, even here, otherwise. She won’t give up on you.”

  “Persistent young lady. Why don’t we just open the door and ask her in?”

  “Don’t say that. Be careful what you invite her to do. This isn’t something to joke about.”

  He had that cold feeling up his back again.

  It was colder, after supper—stew for them and a couple of small turnips for himself, and no drink at all. He had a great deal of trouble falling asleep, with the creaking the house beams made. Unstable ground, he decided.

  Until they creaked and the whole floor seemed to shift a little.

  But senses could trick a body, especially close to sleep. Sasha was sleeping peacefully beside him on the hearthstones, wrapped in a quilt. Uulamets had finally given up writing in his book and taken to his bed, snoring softly. Pyetr rested his head on his arms in the half-light the dying fire provided and listened to the house creaking and listened to the wind in the dry trees.

  Suddenly a single footstep sounded on-the walk, and another on the porch.

  He took a breath to call out to Uulamets, who doubtless knew his visitors and their habits. But for some reason without reason he held that breath for a moment and made no movement or sound.

  Someone knocked on the door.

  Sasha stirred. Uulamets sat up in bed.

  No one moved for a few heartbeats. Then Uulamets got up and headed for the door.

  “Don’t open it!” Pyetr cried, saw he was going to do it, and scrambled under the table and past the bench, groping in the near-dark for his sword as the door opened, as a wind swept in and blew at the embers.

  He grabbed at his sword and unsheathed it, heart pounding—flung an arm over the bench and hurled himself for his feet.

  She was there, white and filmy and wavering in the wind. Dripping with river weed.

  Then the wind swept inside, wreaking havoc of falling herb bunches and clanging pots and sparks flying from the fire.

  “Shut the door!” Pyetr cried. “For god’s sake shut the door!”

  For once someone listened to him. Uulamets heaved it shut, Sasha threw his weight at it, and the bar dropped down. The broom thumped down onto the floor. A last cup fell off the shelf and shattered.

  “God,” Pyetr breathed.

  Uulamets looked at him. Sasha looked like a ghost himself, still bracing himself against the door, although the wind had died away.

  Pyetr did not even try to sheathe the sword. He laid it on the table, picked up the vodka jug and a cup and managed to get the liquid in it instead of on the table, that was all his hands could manage.

  While the house creaked and whatever-it-was in the cellar growled in displeasure.

  He truly wished himself in Kiev—or any place else tonight, for that matter.

  “Only the wind?” Uulamets gibed at him.

  He took the drink and looked up at the old man with a sinking feeling that hereafter Uulamets knew the territory and he did not.

  Hereafter Sasha knew the territory better than he did. And Pyetr was still far from trusting that Uulamets had any good motives toward Sasha or toward him. The steel sword on the table seemed as formidable as it always had been—except when one dealt with ghosts.

  Sasha began picking up the herb bunches and the surviving cups and withered objects that had fallen off the rafters, the god alone knew what some of them were.

  “Move, move,” Uulamets said, waving Pyetr aside, and Pyetr took his cup, his sword and its sheath and went over to sit on his blankets while Sasha swept up.

  He was useless, Pyetr thought glumly, he was absolutely useless to the old man or to Sasha, if the law of the place favored magic and not honest wit. He had no urge whatsoever to get up and help. It was Sasha’s old man. So let him work for him. The old man had wanted Sasha for ghost bait, the old man discovered instead that Sasha had some kind of ability—so the black god take Pyetr Kochevikov, if he was stupid enough to be here, on the peripheries of what Sasha had wished up.

  Or what the old man had wished, who knew?

  Sasha had no more use for him anyway. Sasha had changed his mind and his loyalties, and who knew? Maybe the old man had ‘witched him into it.

  But if magic did it, Pyetr thought, and Uulamets was the master in that, then what could Sasha do or what could he himself have done, except to have gotten them away before they ever fell this deep into Uulamets’ plans?

  And what could he look for in Kiev, but more Dmitri Vene-dikovs and more betrayals and more of the same as Vojvoda? Sasha was the only friend he had ever had who would endure any inconvenience for him, the only one who would, god knew, have carried him through the woods or defended him from a ghost.

  So why go to Kiev, anyway, if the only friend he had was here, at Uulamets’ beck and call?

  He set the cup down and ran the sword back into its sheath, he cast a jaundiced glance at Uulamets sitting over at the table with his gnarled hands clenched in front of his forehead, his lips moving in some god-knew-what-kind-of-incantation, which might or might not work—he still had his doubts on that score, even if there were ghosts. There was no surety spells worked; there was no surety even if some spells worked, that Uulamets’ spells did, against—

  —whatever she was.

  Pyetr said, without moving from where he sat, “Well, what are we going to do about her?”

  Uulamets went on talking to himself. Sasha stopped sweeping and leaned on his broom, looking at him with some indefinable expression: worry, maybe.

  “So we find her tree,” Pyetr said, feeling increasingly foolish with every word that left his mouth. “Then what? Ask her to leave me alone?”

  His wits kept trying to rearrange things sensibly. There had not been a wind, Sasha was not sweeping up broken pottery—but this time he deliberately set himself to remember that face that kept fading on him, and the wind, and the fear: he could not
believe in it now, but he held on to it, reminding himself that he had made up his mind and that, reason aside, he was going to believe it, if that was what it took to exist here and deal with this woods. And Sasha still had the broom in his hands and a pile of broken pottery at his feet.

  “Master Uulamets says he can bring her back to life.”

  “Isn’t that kind of sorcery supposed to be dangerous?”

  Sasha had no answer for that.

  “How is he going to do it?” Pyetr asked. “What’s he need? I’ll tell you, I’ve heard recipes for witches—”

  “I don’t know,” Sasha said. “He says he has to find out where she’s staying. He can’t see her or hear her. I can, almost, see her, that is. But you can see her plain as plain. Can’t you?”

  Sasha wanted an admission. He stood there waiting for it. Pyetr nodded with ill grace and frowned.

  “A rusalka’s very powerful,” Sasha said in a half-whisper, while the old man droned on at the other side of the room. Sasha came and hunkered down at the fireside, and leaned his broom against the stones. “Master Uulamets said she was just sixteen; and he doesn’t know whether it was an accident or not—if she just drowned, that’s one thing, master Uulamets said. That kind of rusalka is bad enough; but if she drowned herself—that’s almost the worst.”

  One had to ask. “What’s worst?”

  “The ones that were murdered.”

  Pyetr gnawed his lip and considered the stones between his feet. “So what does she do? Look for men, I’ve heard that. So what does she do with them?”

  Silly question, he thought then, seeing Sasha blush. But Sasha said, “I’m not exactly sure. I’m not sure anybody’s ever been able to say. They’re—”

  “—all dead,” he said at the same time as Sasha. “Wonderful.”

  “That’s why we have to keep close to you. We don’t know.”

  He hated that “we.” He truly did. He scowled and looked at the sword in his lap.

  “Rusalkas sleep a lot,” Sasha said, “until they want something. If nothing ever comes along at all, they just fade. But if they wake up, especially the violent ones—they’re terribly powerful. And she’s not the only haunt hereabouts. That’s what master Uulamets says. There’s a Water-thing.”

  He stared at Sasha quite unhappily. “Oh, of course. A Water-thing, a Woods-thing, Things everywhere, and every ghostly one of them with a grudge to pay.” He shook his head. “Entirely unreasonable of them, I’d say.”

  “Don’t—”

  “—joke. They’ve got no sense of humor either.”

  “No, they haven’t.”

  “I don’t know why you’re so certain. Maybe they’ve been waiting all these years for a good joke.”

  “Don’t—”

  “—talk like that.” Pyetr made a little flourish of his wrist. “Absolutely. The whole world abhors levity. I’ll apologize to the first leshy I see.”

  “Pyetr—”

  “Earnestly.” He held up his cup. “Be a good lad. It’s been a hard night.”

  “You shouldn’t have any more.”

  “No, I shouldn’t.” He still held up the cup. Sasha took it and brought it back half-full, and Pyetr sat and drank and listened to the snap of the embers and old Uulamets chanting and muttering and mixing things in his pots.

  Sasha watched a while, standing by with his arms folded. Maybe since Sasha was in some measure magical, Pyetr thought glumly, he had some special sense for what Uulamets was doing. Certainly Sasha looked neither confident nor happy in what he saw.

  Pyetr tucked the blanket around himself and his sword, for all the comfort either was in the situation, and shut his eyes and tried to rest without seeing a wisp of white in his memory—

  He could see her face when he shut his eyes now. It was a girl’s face, young and very pale, and desperately unhappy. She had long, fair hair, and a little chin and very large eyes, which looked at him so wistfully and so angrily-

  It’s not my fault, he thought. I don’t know what I ever did.—Though I have my faults, his conscience added with unwanted honesty. He thought of a dozen escapades in Vojvoda. But his conscious self amended hastily, recollecting her nature: But nothing I ever did to you. It’s hardly fair of you, you know.

  She was indeed hardly more than Sasha’s age. He would never introduce Sasha to some of the company he had kept or show Sasha some of the things he had seen—he could not say why, except it would embarrass both of them; and she was so young, she was so like Sasha, he found himself imagining her expression as offended innocence—and her pursuit of him less attraction than vengeful disgust for a scoundrel.

  It’s still not my fault, he thought. I really don’t think I’ve done badly, considering my father’s faults. He really didn’t leave me a good example.

  She hovered quite close to him—amorously close, he thought, much too close, for a young girl he had no wish to be in bed with.

  He tried to wake up, he earnestly tried, in that sense of a dream about to go very wrong indeed…

  He felt a grip on his arm and came to himself upright against the fireplace, sputtering and wiping furiously at his face and neck.

  But there was no water. He was sitting amid his blankets in a room dark except for the embers, it was Sasha holding his arm, and the cold water running down his neck, real as it felt, was nothing he could touch.

  “Are you all right?” Sasha whispered.

  He caught his breath, leaned back against the stones of the fireplace and slid a glance toward the old man’s bed. He could still feel the cold water around him.

  “Damn the luck,” he whispered to Sasha, and shuddered, pulling the musty, dry blanket up around his neck. “All the ladies I’ve courted and the only faithful one’s a dead girl.”

  Sasha’s fingers closed on his arm. “Do you want me to wake master Uulamets?” p

  “It’s only a dream.” It came out with a shiver. “It’s nothing.”

  Sasha did not move. Pyetr slid down further into his blankets and tucked his arms about him. For a long while he was aware of Sasha sitting there.

  He was glad. If he had to believe in the rusalka he reckoned he was morally entitled to believe in Sasha Misurov—in Sasha, he thought, much before Uulamets.

  Small good his sword might do, he thought, too, but he kept it close, against the few situations he did understand.

  CHAPTER 11

  SASHA CAME AWAKE with an uneasy feeling, heard the house timbers creak, and heard a small sound from Pyetr—dreaming, he saw by ember light, and in distress.

  He wanted to know what had waked him, and his heart all but stopped as he saw a black thing skitter along under the table across the room. It might be a trick of the dim light: that was all that kept him from waking Pyetr on the instant. Then it was the glitter of small dark eyes from under that table, eyes which locked with his so fixedly he was afraid to breathe.

  Pyetr stirred, not awake, he thought. And something rattled a shutter. The wind, perhaps.

  But the black thing skittered aside and back into the shadows, so that Sasha was left wondering if he had seen it at all. He was still afraid to move.

  Then he heard the rattle of the second shutter, that at the end of the house.

  Pyetr drew a deep breath and Sasha laid a hand on his shoulder and shook at him, but Pyetr did not wake, and he was yea and nay about wishing it in any concentrated way—totally confused, he thought in some distress, afraid that Pyetr might do something foolish, afraid that noise might bring attack from the Thing under the table or the Thing outside the window, though by what law of the unnatural he had no knowledge. He simply could not reach a decision what to do, even when he heard a board creak on the porch. He sat there like a fool, with Pyetr on one side and Uulamets in his bed both stirring restlessly.

  Suddenly Uulamets woke and sat up in bed, which in some measure he was very glad to see, and in another way, made his heart turn over for fear the things were real. Uulamets put his feet over the side and a
warning stuck in Sasha’s throat—but the Thing under the bed did Uulamets no harm: instead, it came out and clambered with human hands up onto the bed. Uulamets got to his feet and walked barefoot across the floor, to stand and look about him at a house in utter silence.

  “Something’s out there,” Sasha whispered, and Uulamets looked sharply toward him. “On the porch.”

  Uulamets walked over to the table and seemed to listen a moment. “This isn’t good,” Uulamets said. “This isn’t at all good.” He gathered up a bag and began to stuff it with something dry and brown. Moss, Sasha thought: he recalled a ball of it between the uprights by the table. “Twice in one night. She’s getting much too insistent. Or something is.”

  The Thing skittered across the floor suddenly. “That—” Sasha said, and took in his breath as it reached master Uulamets’ feet and climbed up the table-leg.

  It reached the table-top and perched there, dark little eyes glittering in the ember light as it watched. It had a flat face, a cat’s black nose, its jaw and mouth were very like a man’s, and it looked overall, tucked down, like a black ball of dust and tangled hair, the sort of thing a broom might dislodge from under furniture.

  Uulamets gave it hardly a look. He was tucking little pots into the bag, and adding more stuffing, while shutters rattled and the Thing turned about on scarcely seen limbs to hiss at it.

  Uulamets looked at that window, too. The ember light showed anguish on his face. Or fear. Sasha could not be certain. He got to his feet while Pyetr slept like the dead.

  And Uulamets went on with his packing.

  “What are we going to do?” Sasha asked.

  “We,” said Uulamets, “are going to find her.”

  “Find her…—She’s outside.”

  Uulamets threw him a scowling glance. “She won’t face me.”

  Sasha had the most uncomfortable feeling then, the same that he had had any number of times, that there were secrets more than the ones Uulamets wrote in his book, and troubles in this place more than a drowning. Uulamets’ using them for—as Pyetr called it—ghost bait, he suspected was not entirely the desperation of a grieving father—unfair, perhaps: he had no idea personally how desperate a man could become, but in his own way of thinking, a man who would callously trick his guests into favors of the kind he asked… was a man very much like his uncle.