Rusalka

  “Tell me,” Eveshka said to him softly, leaning toward him, “how many people are there in Vojvoda?”

  He had never counted. He reckoned, distractedly—perhaps five thousand. Ten.

  Then with a sudden clutch of fear he thought about the forest, with only one tree left alive.

  “I don’t know,” he said. “I’m not sure.”

  Eveshka was looking at him. Everything seemed to have stopped. The silence was unbearable and unbreakable.

  “I’ve never been beyond this woods,” Eveshka said in that silken soft voice. “My mother used to say I could imagine better than was really true. So I imagine hundreds of houses, all with carved gables and painted shutters. Is Vojvoda like that?”

  “There are houses like that.”

  “And people coming and going all the time…”

  “Farms and shops,” he said, trying to make it all ordinary and uninteresting. “Like any town.”

  “Traders used to come here,” she said. “In my mother’s time. My mother—”

  A shadow fell on Eveshka suddenly. Pyetr started and looked over his shoulder in the conviction there, was something suddenly behind him, and Sasha turned in the same breath.

  But nothing was between them and the fire.

  “I’m sorry,” he began to say, turning about again, his heart still beating hard. But Uulamets was holding Eveshka’s hand, and that shadow persisted, deeper than the ones he and Sasha cast on them both, deeper than the one in which Uulamets’ hand existed, holding hers.

  “Papa—” she said, her voice trembling. “Papa, hold on to me…”

  Pyetr held his breath, with the thought that he ought somehow to do something—lay hands on her, get from between her and the fire—and he did not know what to do—or dare to do anything. But the shadow seemed less after a moment or two.

  “Papa,” Eveshka whispered, staring nowhere at all, “I don’t want to be dead. Please don’t let me go.”

  “I’m not letting go,” Uulamets said. And sharply: “Eveshka!”

  She drew a breath and the shadow passed entirely. Her free hand fluttered toward Uulamets’ sleeve. She touched it as a blind girl might, and said, “Papa? He wants me back.”

  “Who?”

  Eveshka’s breath caught. She shook her head violently and looked toward the corner.

  Toward the river.

  Pyetr very carefully eased his leg around the edge of the bench and began to get up, reaching for his sword.

  “Don’t go out there,” Uulamets said.

  Pyetr stood up and looked at them and at Sasha, who was getting quietly to his feet too.

  “We drove him off once,” Pyetr said. He wanted to believe it would work twice, that the vodyanoi truly disliked swords; and that the Thing had no power over the girl who was sitting in their midst. “You said day or night makes no difference.”

  “Tb most things!” Uulamets said. “Don’t open that door.”

  “Master Uulamets,” Sasha said very quietly, “—where’s Babi?”

  Uulamets did not answer for a moment. Then he said, “Good question.” He carefully got up from the bench, holding Eveshka by the shoulders. “But let’s think of what we don’t want here, shall we? Let’s all think about that—very hard.”

  Pyetr did, most earnestly. He thought about the River-thing going back down its hole with Babi the furball in close pursuit. He wished the sun would find the vodyanoi in the morning and shrivel it. He hated it with all his might. And felt Sasha’s hand close hard on his arm.

  “Wish us safe” Sasha said.

  Then he remembered Sasha had warned him about wishes going further than one wanted, especially a wish for harm.

  But in the same moment the fear just fell apart, leaving him wondering what had just happened to him, and inclined to think nothing had happened at all—

  Except there was still Eveshka with them, a pale and frightened Eveshka, still holding to her father’s hand.

  “It’s all right,” Uulamets said finally. “It’s all right. It’s given up.”

  Pyetr truly wanted someone to explain matters to him. He stood there with the sword hilt like something foreign and somewhat foolish in his hand and with the constant feeling that any moment now the world would shake itself back into recognizable rules.

  But he had been living that way for days.

  “What are we going to do about it?” he asked.

  No one paid any attention to him. Uulamets patted Eveshka on the shoulder and said to her, “Don’t worry. It won’t get in here.” Sasha for his part looked less than reassured.

  So was Pyetr. Trusting to vulnerable windows and a none-so-stout door did not seem a reasonable plan of action.

  So he asked, more loudly, “What are we going to do about it?”

  Evidently no one knew.

  “God,” he said in disgust, and slung his sword belt on, intending not to be parted from it even a step across the room hereafter—two wizards and a ghost being evidently incapable of any better defense. He took a cup from the shelf, the jug from under the table, and poured himself a modest drink—he had no intention of sleeping soundly tonight, either, or hereafter, for that matter—having no wish to wake with some nightmare laying hands on him, or coils, or whatever the case might be.

  The old man had gone soft-headed over his daughter, or his entire attention was taken up with keeping his daughter from going back to bones, the god only knew. Pyetr took his cup and went over to the fireside where it was warm, sitting on Eveshka’s cot while Sasha took to clearing away the dishes and the old man sat and talked to his daughter.

  Snatches of their low voices came to him—Eveshka’s fear of the vodyanoi, Uulamets’ assurances they could deal with it—

  They, Pyetr thought disgustedly—they. They, with his sword and his going down into dark places, which he had no intention whatsoever of doing twice.

  Then Eveshka said something that made him strain his ears and stop in mid-sip. She said, “Papa, I lied: I was running away. The vodyanoi—I think he made everything go wrong. Mama, and Kavi, and everything—I think he made her hate me…”

  “A lie. It was the woods your mother hated. She came from the east. She stayed a season. Her folk came back and she went away, that’s all. She wanted nothing of mine and nothing of this place.” Here, in Pyetr’s troubled glance, Uulamets hugged his daughter’s head against his shoulder, pale gold against snowy white.

  How old was he? Pyetr wondered.

  Uulamets said to his daughter:

  “Don’t mourn might-have-beens. Magic can’t work backwards, only forward. I taught you better than that.”

  “I remember.” Eveshka’s faint voice tugged at Pyetr’s heart, made him regret doubting her and made him wish he could in fact do something—something quite practical, like proposing they all go down to the boat in the morning and set out to Kiev, where things were surely much more reasonable.

  But maybe in a place where things were much more reasonable Eveshka would not even be alive.

  “Pyetr,” Uulamets said suddenly, and Pyetr looked up, but Uulamets only wanted him to give Eveshka her cot back. He got up, and gave a little bow and said, confidently, because she looked so frightened, “We dealt with it once. It won’t get in.”

  Eveshka gave him a sidelong anxious glance, as if she was not certain he was not a threat himself, then sat down on her cot by the fire, turned her back and began to unfasten her belt and her boots—which Pyetr watched in somber fascination until Uulamets took him by the sleeve and drew him and Sasha over into the corner.

  “We have to catch the creature,” Uulamets said in a low voice. “We have to constrain it.”

  “How?” Pyetr asked, and drew a breath. “If you have any notion of me going back in that damned cave, old man—”

  “Be still!” Uulamets gripped his arm and shook it. “Listen to me. I’ve no strength tonight to suffer fools.”

  “Listen yourself, grandfather…”

  “Collect y
our alcohol-soaked wits. That creature has a hold on her.”

  Pyetr had his mouth open to argue; he slid a glance toward Eveshka, whose slender shape showed, firelit through cloth—

  “I want you to go outside just before dawn,” Uulamets said. “Walk down to the river—taking something of hers with you. That’s all you have to do.”

  “All I have to do.” Pyetr started to suggest Uulamets could do it himself, but Uulamets said, clamping down hard on his arm,

  “Failing which—I give nothing for any of our lives, do you understand me? I will not sleep tonight, but I can hold out only so long. Pay attention!” Uulamets said as he opened his mouth a third time, and the grip was all but painful. “You will go out at that hour, you will take the things I give you—you will do exactly as I tell you. Both of you.”

  Chasing after the vodyanoi when it was on the retreat at the knoll was one thing; stalking it on its own terms was quite another. He truly wanted to say no.

  But if they lost Uulamets, he admitted to himself, he did not trust the sword that much, and, unhappily, there seemed no way for an old man, a boy, and a ghost to do much against a thing like that, either, without the sword and some fool to use it.

  “Well,” he said, and scratched a prickling feeling at the nape of his neck when Uulamets had told him the simple details, “lead it up to the porch. How fast is it?”

  “Very,” Uulamets said. “I wish I could tell you that exactly.”

  “You’re sure it won’t cross your line.”

  “It shouldn’t,” Uulamets said.

  So they all went out onto the porch at the first of the dawn, himself and Sasha and Uulamets and Eveshka, Sasha with one of Uulamets’ precious pots in hand and his own instructions, namely to stay step for step with him down the walk-up, then to duck down underneath immediately as they reached the bottom and stay there.

  “Just stay out of my way when I come back,” Pyetr said to Sasha as they reached that point. “I’ll be coming fast.”

  He earnestly hoped so, at least, as he made the lonely walk across the yard to the dead trees and the beginning of the path they took down to the river for water. The river, Uulamets said, was the best place to attract the thing.

  Certainly, Pyetr thought.

  A nocturnal creature like the vodyanoi was a little dim-sighted, Uulamets had said, where it regarded things unmagical; and therefore the small bracelet Pyetr wore about his right wrist, braided from a lock of Eveshka’s hair, would shine like a lamp, Uulamets swore, so far as the vodyanoi was concerned—

  Uulamets said walk slowly down to the river.

  Uulamets said dip the bracelet into the water and be on his guard.

  God, it was dark down there.

  Sasha shivered in his hiding place, his knees going numb against the ground, while he peered out into the dark and waited.

  And waited, what seemed an ungodly long time.

  Pyetr would be coming fast when he came up the hill, that was the plan: attract the thing right up onto the porch, which was the highest point they could lure it; and right there, right beyond the fence and across the road, was the gap in the trees where the first rim of the sun always showed and always cast its first light on the house.

  Master Uulamets had the end and the sides of the walkway up to the porch secured with a dusting of salt and sulphur; and his own post was here, with another jar of the same, when Pyetr should come racing up that walkway with the creature in pursuit.

  His own job was to dash out then and draw one line with the salt and sulphur to seal the trap.

  That was the plan.

  But he very much wished, as he sat shivering in his hiding-place, that Uulamets had set his trap a little closer to the river, and he hoped that Pyetr would not take any chances.

  There was a sudden, a clearly audible splash. He heard Pyetr yell.

  And nothing else.

  CHAPTER 15

  PYETR COLLECTED himself on his feet, his sword still in his hand, by some presence of mind he would not have credited in himself. He could see, in the faint sky-sheen on the water, vast ripples where the thing had gone back under. He hoped to the god it had gone back—whatever had come lunging up out of the water right for his face—a horse, a snake, or something huge, dark, and wet that no rational man could ever admit seeing, involving, his shocked memory recollected, a vast array of teeth.

  His legs began to shake under him. The tremor spread to his arms and his hands and he was ashamed of himself for that, but not very: it was time, he thought, to make a sensible retreat—the more so because for one very dangerous moment he had lost track of it. For that lapse he was honestly vexed with himself, and anxious, seeing the huge wallow in the clay where it might have slipped back into the river. He hoped it had.

  He had been scrambling for his life at that moment. He had never seen anything so fast, never expected it to be out of the water in one move—the wallowed track went as far as the brush; and to his chagrin he realized that that brush went as far as the stand of dead willows between himself and the boat dock and the road.

  That same run of brush likewise edged the trail to the house. That was both ways up, the only two routes to safety that he had, cut off if it had gotten past him onto shore, and right now he could not swear it had not.

  “Pyetr!” he heard. Sasha’s frightened voice, from up the hill. He was afraid to answer. He was afraid to move from where he was, on his narrow strip of shore between the brush and the river, and he had no idea which direction to watch first.

  “Pyetr!”

  God, he thought, the boy was coming down.

  “Stay where you are!” he shouted.

  And saw a liquid darkness flow across that hillside trail, hip-high to a man.

  It put itself between him and the house.

  It lifted its head then and began to slither and heave sideways down the slope toward him.

  “Sasha!” he yelled, gripping his sword, and thinking wildly of a dive for the river—but the river was where it was most powerful. “It’s on the trail! Look out!”

  It gathered speed, it changed its shape and size as it came, smaller and faster. He poised himself to dodge if only it reared up the way it had before, but it was not doing that: its coils rubbed along the trunks of dead trees and slithered wider again as it came.

  He jumped the thing, trod a soft back and sprang for the path, but its tail whipped around and hit him with a force that knocked him back against the brush.

  Its face came around toward him then, all teeth, and he hit it a blow with the sword edge, which it did not like: it reared up and turned its glistening dark head toward a crashing in the brush, a high, shouted, “Here I am!”

  Pyetr’s head was still ringing. He thought he had heard that, and he heaved himself for his feet with all the strength he had left, no wit, just a straight double-handed attack, as the vodyanoi hissed like a spilled kettle and reared up, breaking branches, screaming when he hit it, still screaming as he kept on hitting it for all he was worth.

  It shrank, smaller and smaller until it was only man-sized, a withered creature dusted in pale powder, and Sasha was suddenly in the fray with a stout stick in his hands, clubbing it while it howled.

  It was too tough to stab. Pyetr gave up trying and simply hit as hard and as often as he could, afraid it was going to recover and kill both of them.

  “Get out of here!” he yelled at the boy.

  Which Sasha did not; Sasha kept hitting it, too, yelling, “Keep it from the river!”

  At which time Uulamets arrived and pinned it to the ground with the butt-end of his staff in the middle of its back, while the creature whined and clawed at its own now-manlike face, whimpering and rubbing its eyes.

  Pyetr staggered over to a tree to catch his breath, aching from head to foot, while Sasha grabbed hold of him and asked him was he all right.

  Honestly he was far from sure. He was trying only to get enough breath to stand upright, and simultaneously to watch Uulamets a
nd the creature on the shore.

  Eveshka arrived then—at which realization Pyetr got breath enough to hobble a step or two into the space between her and the prisoner, for what small protection he could be.

  But it was not threatening now: it was trying to shield its face or to wipe its eyes, uncertain which. Pyetr reckoned, standing over it, that it must have met Sasha’s pot of sulphur and salt nose-on—thank the god and Sasha’s brave heart.

  Uulamets meanwhile was threatening it with the sun, bidding it give up and swear to mend its ways, none of which made any more sense than the sight of the vodyanoi shrunk to the size and shape of a little old man.

  “That thing won’t keep a promise,” he protested, when it did swear. “Yes,” it was saying, “yes, I agree, anything, only let me go—”

  “Let my daughter go!” Uulamets said.

  The vodyanoi twisted onto its face and covered its naked head with its hands. It wailed, “I can’t! I can’t do that!”

  “Hwiuur. Is that your true name?”

  It bobbed its head. “Hwiuur. Yes. Give me your leave, man. The sun is coming. Give me your leave to be here—I will promise, I will never, never harm you in this place—”

  “—or elsewhere!” Uulamets snapped, and fetched the creature a crack of the staff. “Free my daughter! Give me back her heart!”

  “I can’t, I can’t, I don’t hold it! Oh, it burns, man, it bums—”

  Heart? Pyetr wondered, stunned by the thought. Uulamets asked with another thump of his staff:

  “Who has it, then?”

  “Kavi Chernevog!”

  Uulamets’ staff met the creature’s back and held it still. Uula mets looked toward Pyetr then with a terrible anger on his face; but that look went past him and past Sasha.

  “Is it true?” Uulamets demanded harshly.

  Eveshka said nothing at all.

  Hwiuur suddenly tried to slither for the river. “Get him!” Pyetr cried, lunging to stop the creature if he could, but Uulamets was there with his staff, and pinned it like a serpent to the ground.

  Serpent it seemed to be for a moment. Pyetr watched in dismay as it lashed and writhed under the staff.