Rusalka

  She’s none of those things now, he thought; but she’s been all of them.

  A wizard. Wanting Pyetr—wanting him to love her, wanting so much-Would he, without that? Would he forget about Kiev, and stay, without that?

  God, how much of it is me holding him? And how much of it is me wanting her for his sake?

  “What about Chernevog?” Pyetr asked again. “How long will he sleep? What do we do with him?”

  So long as he lives, neither one of them is safe, nothing is safe, Chernevog’s the instability…

  God, I’m not thinking straight; I can’t sleep, I daren’t sleep tonight—I haven’t the surety of anything.

  Can he be waking?

  Sasha dropped his head against his hands, thinking that, winning, they had not, after all, won. He could not justify Chernevog surviving, wicked as he was, he could not justify a mercy that endangered others, seeing what Chernevog had done, and in his exhaustion he could not see the river house again, nor staying with Pyetr and Eveshka, where he wanted to be, where he wanted dangerously much to be…

  No.

  Which meant leaving Pyetr to Eveshka, alone, trusting her to take proper care of him—when he at least had known unmagical folk, had lived with them as one of them, for the god’s sake, which Eveshka never had, and that was a terrible danger to him, hardly less than Chernevog.

  But without killing Chernevog—without sleeping enough to have his wits about him—without the confidence to hold Chernevog while he got that rest—

  God, he thought, and wanted Chernevog asleep, staying asleep—

  “He’s slipping,” he whispered to Pyetr. Sweat was cold on his face, in the wind out of the dark. “God, help me, I’m not holding him—”

  “ ‘Veshka—” Pyetr said, looking toward her in alarm. “ ‘Veshka, help—”

  The instability grew less, that was the only way he could think it. Pyetr’s hand stayed on his shoulder a moment.

  “All right?”

  “I’ve got him.” Sasha drew a large breath, let it go slowly. “It’s all right.”

  Pyetr still looked worried. Sasha hit him lightly on the knee. “Don’t do that. Don’t worry. It’s all right.”

  Pyetr bit his lip. “Look. We’ve got him. Eveshka’s all right. Get some rest.”

  Sasha wiped his eyes. “I don’t know what to do, I only know I daren’t take a chance.”

  “On what? On ‘Veshka? She’ll be all right. Get some sleep. We’ll both stay awake—I’m better than you are…”

  “No.”

  “I can want to stay awake, all right?”

  “Listen, we’re getting out of here tomorrow. If you want that blackguard, I’ll carry him back.”

  This, while Pyetr was doing well to carry himself, and they were too spent to patch everything. Sasha stared at him bleakly.

  “We’ll make a raft or something,” Pyetr said. “It’s downstream.”

  “Don’t distract me.”

  “Don’t do that to me, dammit! Stop it!”

  Sasha caught himself, dropped his head into his hands.

  “I’m sorry,” Pyetr said quietly. “Sasha?”

  “I’m all right. I’m all right, just—don’t push me.”

  “He’s not all right,” he heard Pyetr say; felt Eveshka then, wishing at him, afraid of him—and perhaps she spoke to Pyetr, because all at once Pyetr seized his arm and shook at him, saying harshly, “Sasha? What did he do to you? What did Uulamets do?”

  He did not want to answer. He damned Eveshka’s cold honesty. Or whatever made her betray him. Perhaps it was even fear for Pyetr—for all of them.

  “He gave me everything he knew,” Sasha said, and added, because if he was telling the truth, it did not seem safe to tell only part of it, not when it involved Pyetr and Eveshka both:

  “His book. His magic. Everything. Including about Draga. Including about Eveshka.”

  He felt Eveshka withdraw. If Pyetr’s wishes had force he thought he would feel him retreating as well.

  But Pyetr shook at him. “Sasha?” he asked, shook at him again, as if to make sure who he was talking to; and that hurt, that hurt beyond bearing. “Sasha, dammit!”

  “I’m not changed,” Sasha said desperately. “It’s still me, Pyetr.”

  “If he wasn’t dead, I’d kill him!” Pyetr slammed his hand against his knee, then looked, distraught, toward Eveshka. “God—”

  “I know him,” Eveshka said faintly. “You don’t have to explain anything to me.” She stood up, hugging her arms about herself, then looked back and frowned at them, at him, in particular, as if she were as unsure as Pyetr what she was dealing with.

  “He’s—gone,” Sasha said. “I only remember things. Pieces of them. Not everything at once.”

  Perhaps that reassured them. He hoped so with all his heart. Pyetr put his arm around him, but he had just cheated, wanting them still to love him, and he was slipping again—

  Pyetr grabbed hold of him, hugged him and held onto him, while the very air seemed charged and unstable—fraught with power different and colder than the lightning—

  “Pyetr!” Eveshka said, “Pyetr, something’s out there—”

  Sasha tried to use his material eyes, tried to stand up, and made it on the second attempt, while Pyetr gathered up his sword. There came a sound like wind in leaves, from all sides of them, and suddenly a smoky haze closing in about them at the farthest limits of the light.

  “Leshys,” Sasha whispered, and, remembering: “Uulamets wished for leshys…”

  Then Pyetr, to his startlement, called out like a householder to a neighbor, “Misighi? Is that you?”

  If an ordinary man could feel anything magical, it was the good will of these creatures, so terribly reputed that the grandmothers frightened children with the mere mention of them.

  But violent, half-crazed old Misighi folded Pyetr ever so gently to his leprous heart, saying, “It is you, isn’t it? You’re alive.”

  After which so much strength poured into him he felt-terribly sleepy, and free of pain and free of worry.

  “Let him go!” Sasha said.

  But Pyetr looked down at him, at a very worried Sasha, holding, for the god’s sake, his sword. He blinked, feeling sleepier and sleepier, said, “It’s quite all right. They’re here to help.”

  “Health,” Misighi rumbled, touching him with gently quivering fingers. “Be safe. Leave us the wizard.”

  “Chernevog?” Pyetr had the presence of mind to ask, alarmed: he certainly had no notion of leaving them Sasha or Eveshka, but the dark that beckoned him seemed deeper and deeper.

  “We can keep Chernevog,” Misighi said. “Break his bones…”

  Another said: “Weave him tight, tight so he can’t do harm. Make his sleep deep. This is leshys’ work.”

  “Replant,” one said.

  “Regrow,” a fourth.

  “The forests will come back,” Misighi said.

  “Eveshka?” Pyetr called muzzily, feeling heavier and heavier. “Sasha?”

  He thought they answered him, he thought they said they were all right. He hoped—his senses were raw and lately battered and desperate—he dared believe what he knew.

  “Health,” leshys whispered, leaning close with a whisper and a smell of living leaves.

  “Life,” one said, and another, in deep, rumbling tones: “Seeds follow fire.”

  After that, the whisper of leaves, a gentle rocking, eventually a sense that they were moving very fast indeed.

  “Take you to the river,” he dreamed old Misighi whispered to him in that sound, “send you safe home. Wiun says.”

  Sasha waked with a start, on sun-warmed boards, with the soft lapping of water round about, the gentle creak and heave and pitch of the boat under him; and Pyetr and Eveshka asleep beside him, walled in by sacks and baskets that were not theirs. Their hair was all snarled with leaves and twigs, their clothing was precisely as he recollected out of a dream of firelight and burned timbers, a terrible dream
, at the end of which Pyetr and Eveshka had been snatched up and taken from him in a haze of twigs.

  But he could not at all account for the baskets, and here he was safe with Pyetr, and here was Eveshka, peaceful and real and alive—their clothes, the twigs, Eveshka’s very self all evidence of a place so separate from this it tried, dreamlike, to fade out of memory.

  But if he remembered the truth, Uulamets would be dead, Eveshka would be alive, which she clearly was, and Chernevog—

  He remembered leshys. He remembered rescue, finally. He lay there in the sun reassuring himself of his friends’ safety and pulling back the pieces of what was, this morning, very dim and very far, as if there had come a veil between him and that place deep in the woods—and relief from the responsibility that had been his for—it seemed—so very long—

  Replant, he remembered the leshys saying. Regrow, reseed—

  He had something to do, then, and something very much to wish for, since, memory persuaded him, there was a promise he had made the leshys, and there were promises they had made him in return, not in so many words, because words were not of value to them…

  Intentions were.

  Pyetr opened his eyes, looking quite as confused as he had been. Pyetr gazed at him a moment as if deciding much the same course of things, and then, rising on his arm, looked down at Eveshka, touching her face with such an expression as made Sasha feel he should look away, get up and make breakfast, do anything but intervene for a few moments.

  So he got up and turned his curiosity to the baskets and the sacks, poking about in those to find all sorts of goods, the plunder, it seemed, of Chernevog’s whole house loading down their deck; and most importantly, more precious than any jeweled cup, were their own packs—and Uulamets’ book.

  That was what brought the memories back, tumbling one over the other, but gently, as if years separated him from Uulamets and dimmed the unimportant details. It seemed sad to him now that no one had ever really known Uulamets, that not even he had, until the man was gone: saddest of all that no one acutely missed him—nor had Uulamets expected it: that was the essence of things, his own daughter as bewildered by him as his apprentices had been…

  But Uulamets had done as well as a wizard could, Sasha thought, and better than most: of the succession of wizards who had occupied this borderland, one teaching the next—Uulamets had been the wisest; or at least, Sasha thought, with one of those memories surfacing like flotsam—he might have made more mistakes, but never the unforgivable one; and redeemed his greatest misjudgement.

  Chernevog’s book turned up in a basket full of apples: Sasha’s first thought was that the leshys had made a grievous, naive mistake, that he should, without a moment’s pause, pitch it overboard: but then he thought that it would surely be protected, and the god knew where it might drift, let loose in the world—down to Kiev, perhaps, among ordinary folk, or into some other wizard’s hands. He wished the leshys had kept it, walled in and safe; he was thinking that when Pyetr started poking into the baskets himself and wondering if there was breakfast.

  There was. There were cakes and sweets, more than their starved stomachs could deal with, so they made a fire in the stove, and sat in the noon sun and drank hot tea, the three of them, with a little breakfast… after which Eveshka walked about the deck, looked at their situation on the forest side and the side with the sand bar, then said they should put up the bit of a sail they had and wish the wind up strong from the east.

  It made perfectly good sense, once Sasha thought about it.

  Pyetr still maintained his opinion of boats—though it seemed in some situations they were very good things, and that the girl he loved knew them very well—well enough to wish them out of their predicament and to bring the tipping, tilting boat about with its bow in the right direction.

  In fact, after a while of what seemed, after Uulamets’ handling of the boat, quite a sedate and sensible progress, Pyetr decided he could stand up, and even walk casually to the side and hold onto the ropes that braced the mast—to look, of course, for Eveshka’s benefit, as if he had only been sitting down because he wanted to.

  He glanced back at Sasha, who was still seated amid their baggage, which Eveshka had insisted to shift to the center and rear—for balance, she had said, and both of them were entirely willing to oblige in that case. Sasha looked back at him with—he thought, a little concern for his position at the rail, which satisfied him: he might look careless of falling in, as careless and casual about the hazard as Eveshka did, which was precisely the attitude he studied—not to be outdone by a girl so sure and so cheerfully competent.

  He could do that.

  He could sail a boat like this quite handily, pick up the tricks of it by watching (she would think him quite clever) and sail it down to Kiev and back, certainly he could, except the little flutters in his stomach.

  He thought he would patch the seams a bit first, to be sure; and mend the sail—he made his own luck, and that meant seeing to such things and trusting as little as possible to chance.

  In fact he thought he would sail them all down to Kiev—not to go into the city: the god knew what kind of trouble two young wizards could find—but just to see the gold and the elephants, from a quite safe distance.

  Then sail them safely back again, to a cottage furnished like a tsar’s palace, with gold cups and fine rugs, with a flourishing garden, and a woods with all summer ahead to seed with acorns and such—he had found a bird’s nest full of seeds amid the gold, and knew precisely what he was supposed to do with such a gift.

  Then they would settle down for a golden fall and a white winter, and green springs and summers after that… having adopted the domovoi which would shift about and make the house creak quite familiarly and cozily of nights; and Babi—

  That was the thing that disturbed him this afternoon—whether it was worry over the fur-ball or over the fact that he was worried. God, he thought, Pyetr Illitch, after all this—the old man dying, Eveshka alive again, Sasha in his right mind this morning—to spend your worry over the little wretch—

  —who can quite well take care of himself.

  But Uulamets had died and the raven was dead: and it seemed to him that Babi might possibly have gone the way the bird had, not, he was quite sure, struck by the lightning, but simply because he was also Uulamets’ creature.

  I expect him to turn up at the house, Sasha had said at breakfast, when he had asked about Babi.

  Wish him back, he had asked, why don’t you?—With a look at Eveshka, who, he was sure, had at least some sort of special advantage with Babi.

  I’ve tried, Eveshka had said, which was no comfort at all.

  So wipe Babi from the image of the cottage. Maybe he would turn up.

  Or maybe he could get a dog. A black one.

  He let his hand slack on the rope, testing his balance.

  Not bad at all, he thought, and looked back to see if Eveshka was watching.

  He walked across the deck, past Sasha, past the deckhouse, to the stern, to stand there quite confidently—till a swell rocked the boat and he had to grab the rail.

  She smiled at him, quite kindly, considering; and went on smiling at him in a way that could make a man forget all about keeping his balance.

  The Cockerel’s boy was not naive and certainly Uulamets’ heir was not: the looks Pyetr and Eveshka kept giving each other meant two people quite, quite lost to reason.

  It worried him; it made him wish—dangerously—for Eveshka to keep thinking sensibly, for Eveshka to know-She did not want him wishing at her, she let him know that, quite angrily, hearing echoes of her father; and he:

  Speak to him, Eveshka, don’t wish him: your father never learned to say things in plain words. That was where he failed you: that’s what I learned, that’s what he was learning. Don’t make his mistake with Pyetr.

  That stopped her. He stood at the corner of the deckhouse, she stood by Pyetr at the tiller—Pyetr was steering, which was why for a little th
e boat had tipped and faltered, Sasha supposed, but it was steady now; and he hoped to the god Pyetr did not suspect the quarrel.

  Eveshka did think about it. She went from being angry to being worried: she let him know that; and even said, earnestly, “Thank you, Sasha.”

  Much better, Sasha thought, feeling that she truly meant that. She wanted—

  Wanted things to be right. Wanted Pyetr to be happy. Wanted that for all of them.

  A generality, he thought, and stood there pretending to watch the shore, all the while thinking and thinking, deciding finally that he could not get between them, he could not tell Uulamets’ daughter to mind what she was wishing.

  But he had a sudden notion who could.

  Babi, he said sternly to that Place where such creatures went, as he had been calling more than once today.—Babi, get back here, right now. No nonsense.

  He had no answer, only what he had had before, a fey, furtive presence, confused and lost, not sure where it belonged now.

  “You!” he said aloud, walked back around the corner to the baggage, picked up the vodka jug—

  And pitched it at the mast.

  It stopped in mid-air.

  “Babi?”

  The jug waddled forward, with two moonlike eyes floating disembodied above it.

  “That’s much better,” Sasha said, folding his arms. “I know who might well give it to you—if you asked him nicely.”

  A tonguetip licked invisible lips. The jug waddled past him, around the corner of the deckhouse, in search of sympathy.

  About the Author

  C. J. Cherryh’s first book, Gate of Ivrel, was published in 1976. Since then she has become a leading writer of science fiction and fantasy, known for extraordinary originality, versatility, and superb writing. Her Downbelow Station won a Hugo award. She lives in Oklahoma and was Guest of Honor at the 1989 Balticon convention.

 

 

  C. J. Cherryh, Rusalka

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